* Posts by TeeCee

9433 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007

EU boffins in plan for 'more nutritious' horsemeat ice cream

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Re: No prions

All well and good, but overlooks the real reason why that particular risk shouldn't worry anyone.

After the dust had settled, it was proved that the whole thing was bugger all to do with anything endemic in cattle spinal tissue and was actually due to isolated incidents of cross contamination from scrapie afflicted sheep, as was originally suspected all along. This goes a long way toward explaining why the vast epidemic of vCJD predicted rather conspicuously failed to occur.

DEFRA decided to keep that under wraps, for fear of being sued into the middle of next century for their hysterical overreaction and gratuitous, unfounded screwing over of the British beef industry.

Google battery drain.

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Unhappy

Re: Google battery drain.

More info:

ICS (and possibly earlier release) users see this as "Google services" chewing the battery like its free. JB must have the goocruft (tm) (beta) integrated, as they just seem to get a honking usage by the Android OS itself[1] reported.

Edit: Rather amusingly, Android's fragmentation seems to be working in Google's favour here. While there are many complaining about battery life after update on various devices, they all seem to be directing their invective at the device in question and/or its makers. Very few seem to have joined the dots and spotted that this is a Google cockup affecting a whole range of devices..

[1] Or "lies" as I like to think of it.

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Flame

Google battery drain.

Courtesy of some recent Google updates, something called "Google services" is now thrashing the living shit out of my battery life. Apparently, while teh internets are awash with reports of this issue on just about every device you've ever heard of[1], Google deny there's a problem.

Anyone here worked out how to fix it yet? Uninstalling Google Services solves it, but the fucking thing reinstalls silently as soon as a data connection is available (Google? That's EVIL, that is....).

[1] From reading around it looks like they've even managed to shaft the iPhone too, so this cockup is not even Android specific.....

Slim Shady wannabe Zuck's Facebook 'STOLE' MY SONG - Eminem

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Alert

Hang on....

Surely if it's been posted on Faceberk, then under their Ts & Cs it belongs to them and there is no case here?

The bunker at the end of the world - in Essex

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Meh

Re: good to be able to look on this so light-heartedly

I recall seeing an interview fairly recently with a military type who was senior in NATO back in the day. He was asked what the plan was for a defence of Western Europe.

"Well, the plan was we'd try to keep them on the other side of the Rhine until the Americans got their kit across the Atlantic."

"Would that have worked?"

"No, not a chance. They'd have overwhelmed us well before the Yanks could get their heavy stuff over in significant quantity."

"Ok, so in that position what would have been done."

"There was only one plan really. Fall back, get the tactical nukes released, nuke their armoured spearheads in Germany, then cross our fingers and see if they felt like escalating."

"What? You mean the only plan was that NATO would use the first nuclear strike? You can't be serious."

"I'm deadly serious. It was the only workable option we had.".

"And what if the use of nuclear weapons was not approved?"

"Ah, that would be a political problem and it would then be up to the politicians to discuss our surrender terms.".

I'm guessing that the Germans weren't exactly delighted with this approach, which appears to me to revolve around either using Germany for nuclear target practice or handing it to the Soviets.

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Meh

Re: Waiting for Eadon

Er, that's "General Protection" to you.

For some reason, whenever anything went wrong in Windows it was always his fault.

Smartwatch face off: Pebble, MetaWatch and new hi-tech timepieces

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Re: Tools

And yet, as the only function that they all seem to share is Tw@ter and Faceberk alerts, they would seem to be aimed directly at the vain.

Presumably this is why Apple are gettiing involved. They've spotted a perfectly good piece of available-off-the-shelf tech that should sell like hot cakes to the self-obsessed, if only it didn't look shit.

COLD FUSION is BACK with 'anomalous heat' claim

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"....and test a black box whose operations are invisible."

Or a "car battery" as I like to call it.

'India attacked Norwegian telco to get at Pakistan, China' - report

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WTF?

Methinks they doth protest too much......

.......claiming the reference to Appin in the report was a “marketing gimmick on the part of Norman AS” and that it has already initiated legal proceedings against the Norwegian firm.

Hmm. All Norman AS have done is mention the Appin references in code and suggest that someone might be trying to frame them? And that's caused them to go so far off the deep end that they're risking decompression sickness?

So the only question remaining is; who got them to write it then?

Our new 1.5TB lappie drive isn't thick, it's just the densest - HGST

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Meh

Cost per Gigabyte? Yes.

Bu then performance got a mention.

There, the hybrids pee over bog standard disks from a great height and the difference in cost isn't that much.....

WordPress warns of mass Tumblr defections after Yahoo! deal

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Meh

Hmm, you can see where this is going.

Just one question then.

If everyone who can buggers off to Wordpress, leaving Tumblr as the world's first specialist blogging site for filth, is that going to make Tumblr more or less popular?

i.e. Is going long or short on Yahoo! shares the correct move?

New 4TB drive spaffs half a telly season into your eyes AT ONCE

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Coat

Re: the rustling of small leaves.

Now you're jutht taking the psith.

Intel's answer to ARM: Customisable x86 chips with HIDDEN POWERS

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Golden screwdriver.

I thought that referred to the practice of the extra bits being available on all chips, but only turned on when you paid for the privilege?

This would appear to be more of a custom ASIC approach, where you pay up front for a custom chip, only where said ASIC happens to be a shonky old x86 CPU with some extra sequins sewn onto its frock.

US boffin builds 32-way Raspberry Pi cluster

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Happy

Re: Lateral thinking needed

You may be on to something. ISTR that there were moves afoot in the Pi world for the things to support power over ethernet at some point in the future, which would make this eminently practical as well as outrageously cool.

You'd have the only cluster in the world where the failure of one of the little plastic tang things on an ethernet cable causes it to drop a node..........both figuratively and literally.

Rogue Nokia splinter cell drops its Jolla phone A-BOMB

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WTF?

Oh really?

....like a removable SD card only bigger, brighter and more proprietary.

Well that sounds like the most stupid idea of all time. Pay for proprietary memory cards and need a bag to carry 'em in? Yeah.......right.

You'd have to be a right drooling OS fanboi to even think about getting something hamstrung like that.

It! Started! With! A! GIF!... Yahoo! Actually! Buys! Tumblr! for! $1bn!

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WTF?

Animated GIFs?

How quaint.

Nine-year-old Opportunity Mars rover sets NASA distance record

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Coat

Re: One difference

...the Lunokhod craft were controlled from Earth.

They were probably worried about the possibility of it defecting to the Imperialist Western Moon if they made it autonomous.

NASA and Google team up to buy into quantumish computing

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Joke

"...a compact, low-power recognizer for mobile phones..."

How many test cycles did it have to go through before it would consistantly spot that a Galaxy Note is a phone rather than a tablet? Did they have to hard-code that?

London Olympics site to become digital mega-hub

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Meh

Re: boris

While I have a heck of a lot of time for Ian Hislop and find that he tends to be right about most things, when I read Boris' written pieces I have to conclude that, in this case, he's wrong.

Anyone who writes and uses classical references that well cannot be an idiot. Pompous arse possibly, but idiot? No.

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Pint

"...the slightly un-snappily named IBC/MPC."

Thank you Boris, a masterpiece of understated sarcasm there.

Hunt: I'll barcode sick Brits and rip up NHS's paper prescriptions

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Works very well.....

....in those countries that already do this.

It's not like this is a new idea and that proven, working systems to support it cannot be had off the shelf.

Prankster 'Superhero' takes on robot traffic warden AND WINS

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Re: Get yourself issued with two notices for two different car parks at the same time

Not quite. It is incumbent upon the registered keeper to identify the driver by return (Section 172 statement).

The problem here is that "The driver was Mr ${name} who lives in ${country}, here are some sketchy contact details" is the oldest scam in the book. Using that one results in your taking on a system that is convinced you are lying through your teeth.

I can't quite see how this ended up as getting done for speeding twice. It should either have ended up as the OP getting done for speeding in Hull and ${Aussie_bloke} getting done for Watford, or for the OP getting done for Hull and either failing to identify the driver[1], attempting to pervert the course of justice[2], or both[3] for Watford.

[1] Nasty.

[2] Very nasty.

[3] There goes the book.....

TOO GOOD! Groupon ex-boss to drop, er, 'motivational business album'

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WTF?

'...releases an album of "motivational business music".'

"And now, before we start work, let us all sing 'Glorious efforts of labouring workforce will promote success', as written for you by the Dear Leader himself......"

'I think you DO do evil, using smoke and mirrors to avoid tax'

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Coat

I can think of a possible reason.

I very much doubt that a highly trained CIA operative is going to be walking the streets of Moscow wearing a really bad blond wig.

"How will I know who you are?"

"I'll be the one wearing a really bad blond wig...."

Makes a change from dark glasses, a carnation in the lapel and a copy of Pravda folded open at page 4......

Acorn founder: SIXTH WAVE of tech will wash away Apple, Intel

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Coat

Re: It's all about the Genes,,,

Icon with the slobbery tongue-thingy

Gene Simmons?

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Re: You can call me AI

Banks' doesn't really explore too deeply why the Minds keeps humans around, other than perhaps for their own amusement.

It was mentioned. From memory and heavily paraphased, every culture (small "c") that builds Minds unintentionally colours their thinking with their own view of the universe, morality, etc. Thus the Culture (big "C") Minds have a lot in common with their human counterparts, enjoy their company and would miss them if they weren't around.

The Culture had worked this out and tried building Minds lacking any cultural (any bloody "c" you like) bias. These would wake up, look at the universe and as soon as they had got their bearings, immediately sublime. A fact that pissed off The Culture greatly, although they kept repeating the experiment in the hope that one of them would hang around long enough to tell them what they were doing wrong.

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Coat

Re: google car

Google make the car, Apple make the maps.....

Honey, I BLEW UP the International SPACE STATION - in full 3D

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Coat

Re: Wow

Yes, but look at the amount of processing they had to throw at the problem to create that effect.

Presumably the next challenge is Kristen Stewart. They'll probably need vast amounts of DDR3 configured as ramdisks for that.

Have your users managed to force iOS devices on you?

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WTF?

Re: "Have your users managed to force iOS devices on you?"

Name an essential business service for which an iThing is a prerequisite.

Life on Mars means subsisting on grim diet of turd-garden spinach

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Coat

Soviet cannabis farms........IN SPAAAAAAACE!!!

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Coat

Re: Desire for a brand new combine harvester

I'm not sure that the ladies are likely to be attracted by your posession of a gigantic Glaswegian retired football manager pickled in single malt.

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Alert

...the process of preparing a poo garden to grow emergency potatoes.

OMFG, I'd rather have the spinach......and I really hate spinach.

Hint: The bit of spinach you eat grows above the shit it's planted in, while the spuds grow in it.

Mobile tech destroys the case for the HS2 £multi-beellion train set

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Unhappy

Re: Not the full picture

Other bit.

I've always found that you get a heck of a sight more done and some actual ruddy decisions made, in a two hour face-to-face meeting than in a whole day of conference calling.

Conf calls are fine for status updates and the like, but utter crap if there's anything remotely contentious on the agenda. Also a conf call seems to head straight to catastrophic meltdown if the number of participants gets anywhere near double figures, while physical meetings of 20 or more are perfectly productive.

TeeCee Gold badge

....and will be running continental freight as well as passenger services.

Now that is important. Pick a European motorway and drive along it, what's missing? Yup, lane 1 and 20% of lane 2 are not solidly packed with trucks.

Hex & plugs & ROM & roll: Computer music stars rock Bletchley

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Happy

Re: New Order.

Yes, the Fairlight name rings a bell. I'm fairly sure that what I recounted above was what was I heard said at the time though.

Then again, that was on the radio in the car and one heck of a long time ago now, so it's entirely possible that my recollection is hazy. The alternative here is that they were being economical with the truth when interviewed........

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Happy

New Order.

I remember hearing a radio programme some years ago, interviewing the members of New Order and going back over their career. One thing that stuck in my mind was when they had their first real bit of success.

They said they'd just got the first royalty cheque for the then princely sum of 25 thousand pounds and feeling that they'd "made it". They talked for a bit on what they were all going to spend this massive windfall on and one thing they all though they should do was reinvest a bit of it in something for the band.

At that point one of them chirped up and said that they should really get this new thing he'd played with called a "sampler", which would offer massive opportunities to play with different sounds to them, allowing them to do some completely new and innovative things.

"That's a great idea, we'll have one of those. How much is it?"

"About 25 thousand pounds........."

Easy come, easy go.

New Lumia 925: This, loyalists, is the BIG ONE you've waited for

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"...I'd like to have MicroSD expansion. But the compromise wasn't worth it,"

Depends whether you want to sell any or not. I might have bought one, but for that.

Now, I wonder how much of that omission was down to design considerations and how much was due to commercial considerations? Put it this way; I doubt Vodafone would have kicked in quite so much for an exclusive deal on the 32Gb version, if the punters could just buy the 16 anywhere and whack in as much additional storage as they wanted.

Also Apple should sue. I'm sure that removing any expansion capabilities, so you can fleece punters by charging an eye-watering price for every additional gigabyte, is their IP.

Top guns doomed as US Navy demos first carrier-launched drone

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WTF?

Re: They don't really need carriers either

The trouble with that is that, if you want to launch more than one, you need somewhere to park them as they queue for the catapult (like a flight deck).

Also you need somewhere to store, repair and rearm them (like the hangers under a carrier's flight deck).

So, given the requirement for a ship full of hanger and workshop space with a flat top on it, you might as well call it an aircraft carrier and land on it.......

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Happy

Re: sprained fingers from hitting the fire button.

Presumably one of them got a medal for coming up with the idea of attaching a piece of thread to their last one.

Either that or repeatedly flicking the same one up through the coin return after levering the flap off.

On the hunt for a new ampere

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Facepalm

Re: They need to create a framework

....Who knows how powerful a horse is anyway? Equestrians? What sort of horse? etc. but top gear and their fans love to hate anything French.....

Yes of course. Top Gear should use the continental system, in which a car's output is measured in "PS". This stands for "pferdestärke", which is german for, er, "horsepower".....

Serious WPAD flaw in IE?

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Re: Serious WPAD flaw in IE?

Ah, got it at last.

http://wpad.com/wpad.dat (in incorrect implementations, see note in Security below)

That bit in brackets is important. WPAD should never go off-net looking for a WAPD server, which is why wpad.com does not work unless you've bent the config in Windows to make it work. The slight snag here is in the UK's use of ".co.uk" rather than just ".uk" which fools WPAD into reckoning it hasn't hit the TLD yet and is still on the local network[1].

Shame we can't get 'em to cough up wpad.co.uk and see if it really is a hole or not. Whether it's a nasty hole would depend on whether the proxy autodiscover then takes what it's given as read or correlates the returned domain proxy info in the wpad.dat served with the domain the machine's joined to (I cannot find a definitive yay or nay on that). If it did that, it would never work as a MITM attack directly on a home / workgroup based machine, although it would still provide the opportunity to poke for vulns in the code that processes the wpad.dat.

Incidently, as far as I can make out that's not a flaw in IE but one in Windows itself. Just 'cos the associated configuration options can be accessed via the IE settings doesn't mean it's internal to IE. I reckon this would apply to anything using network access that does not have its own proxy config baked in and thus uses the Win default settings, unless I've missed something important.

[1] And there's that legendary "let's make life easy for the admins and assume XYZ" crud from MS that's behind half the ruddy vulns. On a par with the fact that a DNS hit on an unqualified name causes it to assume that what it gets from there is on the local intranet. A bit of a pisser now that the likes of "exchange" or "safeserver" could be valid TLDs.....

Are Disk Drive Vendors screwed (by flash)?

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Re: Are Disk Drive Vendors screwed (by flash)?

Define "screwed".

Last time around it was tape that was supposed to be screwed by disk archiving. Tape is still around and highly profitable, although less prevalent at the lower end of things than it once was.

Behind the scenes and doing the heavy lifting, I would expect that the tiering will remain as long as solid state devices remain higher priced per Gb than disks. If you're talking about terabytes or more, why swap to using expensive flash when you don't have to?

Remember here that not all data is access time critical. While it may well be important to wring the last picosecond out of the access to that database record, waiting a second or two while the first bit of that 3 hour film to be streamed is accessed is no big deal.

When it comes to the client end of things, the other thing you have to factor in here is price. While at the lower capacities SSDs are becoming commodity items and desktops with small SSD boot disks are de rigeur, as soon as you want a few hundred gigs in your laptop you are in eye-wateringly expensive territory. Seagate have an ace in the hole here with their Momentus XT range, which give SSD like access to the frequently used smaller stuff, while also providing capacity without breaking the bank (Aha, there's that tiered storage again). It's a mystery to me (and probably a source of immense frustration to Seagate) why more laptops don't come with these as OEM fit, as the results in "real world" use are very impressive.

Drone to deliver beer-as-a-service

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Coat

Roflcopter.

(unnecessary text bit)

Samsung sends gigabit '5G' signal TWO WHOLE KILOMETRES

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Meh

Hmm.

...used 64 antenna elements in what you might think of as a “massively MIMO” system....

Presumably all well and good when all 64 antennae at each end are happily talking to each other in isolation. What happens when umpty-something other bundles of 64 in the area want to chat at the same time?

UK.gov blows a fuse at smart meter stall, sets new 2020 deadline

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Facepalm

So, let's just check this.

They've worked out that the things don't stack up financially for the installers and that the comms standards and infrastructure required to support them properly will not be around for a few years yet?

And the solution is to accelerate rollout and add another layer of cross-charging bureacracy to add cost?

The British Civil Service: Designing ridiculous solutions to idiotic political non-problems for over 100 years....

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Facepalm

Re: Yay for government

...the criminally stupid masses who think that everything the Daily Mail prints is 100% true without bias or fabrication.

Er, those are UKIP's core voters....

Global nappy hawker trials TweetPee moist-baby monitor

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WTF?

Ts & Cs

From Tw@ter's terms: You may use the Services only if you can form a binding contract with Twitter...

That would seem to specifically rule out use by anyone under the age of legal responsibility.

Surely adults can change their own nappies?

Apple asked me for my BANK statements, says outraged reader

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WTF?

Identity,proof of residence,bankstatement.

s/terrorists/tourists/.........

Review: BlackBerry Q10

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Meh

Re: Ooh...

The point? Cursor positioning is an obvious one.

This is one place where the touchscreen devices with onscreen keyboards have a serious problem. If I want to edit what I've just mistyped[1], I first need to move the cursor to the right place. In the absence of a trackball, trackpad or arrow keys, this involves poking the screen and then having the phone or tablet put the cursor in a random location that's fairly close to where I wanted it.

Usually takes a minimum of four stabs and some invective, to get the thing in the right place.

[1] Or, more usually, what some corrective feature has decided to replace my typing with.

Deep inside Intel's new ARM killer: Silvermont

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Facepalm

Goalposts.

So what would an ARM processor fabbed at 22nm and using tri-gate tech do then?

Intel cannot win this one if all they can do is throw bleedin' edge design tricks at the problem to break even, as all the opposition has to do to beat them is play catchup when the tricks used go mainstream. Face it Intel, x86 has just too much bloat and baggage for the low-power, small form factor market.