* Posts by TeeCee

9433 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007

Samsung docs tease 11.8in, 2560 x 1600 tablet

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Coat

Re: At that size ...

Nice astroturf surface on your post there.....

Jackson’s Hobbit becomes a trilogy

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It's not the Dwarves.....

.....it's the Mithril. That's stuff's seriously expensive.

I hear that they'll be saving money by shooting all the scenes set in the Desolation of Smaug on location in Slough.

Siri sued again as Taiwan uni cries foul over patents

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Other cases?

"It's also looking at whether voice recognition tech from Microsoft and Google may also have infringed its patents...."

Hmm, dunno about Google, but I reckon MS are in the clear. Their antiquated Voice Commander product for the old WinMo platform was around well before 2007. It's also far and away the best for both recognition of speech and pronunciation on readback of anything I've ever used on a mobile device.

Dear MS: Port to Android? Pretty please? I'll even pay for it.......

Chinese student's smut obsession lands 2,000 in JAIL

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Joke

Re: police downloaded over 1TB of porn

A police spokesman said: "Yes we do have a huge number of dicks and cunts in the station, but that's nothing new."

O2 dropped the ball in Olympic cycle race Twitter fiasco

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WTF?

Anyone?

Can anyone remember how bicycles used to work before the invention of GPS and Mobile data?

Sony Xperia Go waterproof Android phone review

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Re: burnt by the Xperia Play fiasco

Hmm, ICS seems to run just fine on my 512Mb Xperia Arc S, although I have seen that some of the slower devices have problems in this area.

All generalisations are wrong.........

Japanese fanboi builds FrankenPhone from 'bits of iPhone 5'

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Joke

So that's it?

Might as well wait for the iPhone 6 then.....

<Sound of another $2bn disappearing off round the U-bend>

Apple blacklisted by Chinese consumer watchdog

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Re: Surprised?

Car repairs.

A mate once carefully wound a piece of fine fuse wire around each of his spark plugs, between the compression washer and the body, prior to putting his car in for servicing. After servicing there was, as expected, four plugs on the invoice. Removing the "new" plugs revealed a piece of fine fuse wire wound around each one.....

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Re: Short termism?

"...so that's just outside the statutory 1 year warranty period here in the UK...."

I think you'll find that the Sale Of Goods Act revolves around what is considered to be "fit for purpose" when it comes to deciding when liability ends. In the case of something sold on a two year contract, I suspect that you'd find in court that "fit for purpose" there would be a minimum of, er, two years.

However, as the contract is with a mobile telco it's probably their problem rather than Apple's. Certainly worth a punt in the Small Claims Court for anyone in that position I would have thought (assuming that the piss is not being taken and the device looks like it has been treated with reasonable care). I'm sure there will be an actual lawyer along in a moment to clarify this.

Boffins puzzled over impossibly fast ice avalanches on Saturn's moon

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I can't look at pictures of Iapetus......

......without feeling an uncontrollable urge to split it open and find out what the plastic toy inside is.

Samsung plonks universal search BACK into Galaxy S IIIs

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Re: Fail

Er, rather more than similar. Your Honda Concerto or Legend at the time came with a badge on the slam panel that said "Made in Longbridge by Austin-Rover". They were the same car as the Rover 200 and 800, off the same production line, only the trim differed.

The engines were the same too and Rover's continued to buy in Honda engines for some time after the partnership broke up due to their being purchased by BMW, who Honda perceived as a key competitor. That BMW purchase is what destroyed Rovers, as they were overnight deprived of their next generation of mid-range (1.6 - 2.7 litres) engines. BMW's engines were all in-line units and unsuited to use in the transverse engined Rover vehicles without major and expensive modification. A marriage made in hell.

The "K" series was an in-house project and the only tech brought in was the Variable Valve Control system from Associated Pistons (which still ranks as the best variable induction timing system ever made by anyone in my book). As the technology of the "K" series differs radically from anything Honda ever produced I doubt they had too much of a hand in it. For a start, they'd have spotted that the coolant capacity of the head design was inadequate and avoided the legendary head gasket issues. This latter was compounded by the sudden need to take an engine orginally designed to top out at 1.4 litres in a four pot and bore it to 1.6 and 1.6 versions, courtesy of the planned Honda engines being unavailable. The engines so built proved hideously unreliable. The money that should have gone towards sorting the problems of the "K" series four-pot got allocated to building the KV6 engine for the 75 project which, despite its name, has little in common with the "K" and is a rather good unit.

By that time the rot had really started to set in. BMW ditched the company, the planned KV8 engine for the mooted return of the Rover 3500 V8 never materialised. Market pressure required a cheaper, 4 cylinder engine in the 75, yet no money existed to make one. This resulted in the suicidally stupid decision to blow the "K" series, despite its already well-known propensity for blowing up when normally aspirated.

The rest is, as they say, history.

Why one storage admin fears Justin Bieber

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Mushroom

Re: Not an as

Didn't work then. I still have no interest in anything Justin Bieber related......

Well that's the message I got from an advertorial saying; "Dell are a bunch of twats, but you just have to buy their stuff to handle your hugely important collection of Justin Bieber trivia."

Twitter titsup: Our failover was actually just FAIL ALL OVER

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Meh

Twitter down?

<Battery Sergeant-Major Williams>

Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

</BSM Williams>

'We asked firms if they were looking at Windows 8, most laughed'

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Coat

You may be proud of your B16C0C, but it's actually too short......

BOFH: Shove your project managementry up your mailbox!

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Re: Reminds me ..

I came out with one here a while back:

"A verbal representation paradigm for exanguination incidents and their postulated relationships with previously established facts."

Or, put more simply, "stating the bleedin' obvious with loads of wankwords".

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There's no edge on a baseball bat........

Story gone

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Flame

Re: Not sure about the processor

I just had a look at the official website, it's another one where geolocation overrides common sense.

I type in "samsung.co.uk" and it decides that as the point of presence is somewhere else (some of our proxies are more forgiving than others), it'll give me a site I can't fucking read EVEN THOUGH THE .CO.UK ADDRESS IS VALID!

Obviously I typed in .co.uk in error 'cos I'm a complete bloody idiot who hasn't got a clue what he's doing. That's the message I got anyway.

They just got shitlisted for being too lazy to link the "real" in-country address to "samsung.com/${isoc}" and instead just linking the lot to their automated geolocation resolver. Dickheads.

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Facepalm

Aha! The first to fall foul of dogged's eminently sensible rule for disqualification.

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WTF?

I dunno. Why would I need a horse, if I couldn't fit it with three extra legs and teach it the cha-cha-cha?

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Coat

Presumably it's what you use for laptopiary.

Somthing like a Brazilian wax?

BIG BOOBS banished from Linux kernel

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Re: Sweet Jesus in a chariot driven sidecar...

Is that Judas' Chariot?

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Flame

Re: Bill Gates is obviously Guilty

Oh bloody hell. Will people knock it off with the "Julian is a good bloke and girls should just be fucking grateful to get it from him." thing.

It's people like you who are directly responsible for making rape one of the least reported and prosecuted crimes going. In every bloody case that; "she's obviously lying, it's a put-up job" is trotted out by fucktards who happen to like the perv in the dock.

Incidently, the vast majority of rapes are reported "retrospectively". It's the nature of the crime in question.

@the upvoters: Shame on you too.

I'll make my mind up once he's been convicted or aquitted in a court of law. As he seems intent on avoiding having to challenge the evidence, I'm leaning towards "guilty as sin" myself.

Google shakes up Android Jelly Bean to fend off malware meanies

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WTF?

Re: XOOM ICS UK

Is there anything Android USB related that doesn't require USB debugging to be on?

I'm beginning to wonder why it's bloody switchable and off by default......

Is running IT for the Olympics the worst job in the world?

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It's not, er, golf.

"...the sight of people staring at screens, a spectator sport to compete with golf."

More like cricket actually. Long periods of apparent inactivity, punctuated by some bloke trying not to be seen as he attempts to adjust the seam around his balls.....

Yes, yes, the Olympics are near. But what'll happen to its IT afterwards?

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Re: A bar?

"...those coke machines will have to be crammed full of alcohol..."

Ah, you appear to be suffering from advertising indoctrination. You see "coke machines" and "journalists" and think; "What would the hacks want with Coca-Cola?".

I see "coke machines" and "journalists" and applaud the cunning exploitation of a marketing opportunity by the Bolivians.

Windows 8 'bad' for desktop users - Gartner's one-word review

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Re: Service Pack 1 (win8SP1)

I'll take that bet as I don't think it will.

9 on the other hand........

It all depends on how well 8 goes with the public. If there is the mass rush to touch interfaces that MS are hoping for, then they'll probably stick to their guns and push same to the corporates. If touchy , feely desktops don't take off, 9 will get the schizophrenic makeover.

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Re: History repeats itself

You missed the elephant in the room.

In the Enterprise world, just about everyone stuck with XP until around now and most are at some stage of a 7 migration, quite the reverse of putting off updates in fact. Once that's complete they'll be expecting to sit on it for a while, so 8 has pretty much nowhere to go in that market. MS are well aware of this and are taking the opportunity to pilot touch with the consumer market. Lessons learned will go into 9.

Watching Olympics at work? How to avoid a £1k telly-tax fine

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Re: "I think the batteries have to be internal."

Isn't that also illegal?

You could be charged.......

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Re: Anyone notice how most of the comments on El Reg

http://xkcd.com/303/

Ocean-seeding experiment re-ignites geo-engineering debate

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Trollface

Very droll and "suenarmys" caused me to imagine a tidal wave of battalions of Apple lawyers.

Double troll points for that.

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Re: how much carbon is burned

"That may sound daft Halifax Nova Scotia runs its buses on fish oil..."

Er, cetacean needed?

Darth Vader is a pansy

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Devil

Coloured boxes.

+ 1 for black. Not too bothered about beige / white / whatever. The trend for everything to be silver-coloured plastic not so long ago? That was the work of Satan.

I'm still waiting for an explanation as to why all the TV and HiFi manufacturers decided simultaneously that they wanted that el cheapo, '80s Binatone/Goldstar/Amstrad look......

Austrians drool over 15th-century jub buckets

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Meh

Re: ... underpants "were considered a symbol of male dominance and power"

Just one thing to clear up then. Who wears the eagle winged helmet in your family?

Google ordered to censor 'torrent', 'megaupload' and more words

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Happy

Obvious solution.

Automagically replace any terms they object to with "Vichy". That should remind 'em of what happens when you abide by rules dictated by a bunch of fascists.

Google Nexus 7 shipping cock-up enrages fandroids

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Joke

What on earth is going on?

Haven't they learned their lesson about slavishly copying Apple?

Knicker wetting, semi-literate fanbois screaming blue murder 'cos they can't get the latest shiny within 2 picoseconds of the official launch time? I'm sure Apple own the IP on that.

Judge: Apple must run ads saying Samsung DIDN'T copy the iPad

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Happy

Re: Apple should be banned from advertising altogether

There is a simple answer.

Sue Barker and a rocket launcher seems to do the trick.......

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Coat

Re: PMSL++++

Yup, just don't use a Samsung Tab, shit doesn't stick to them.....

Microsoft picks October 26 for Windows 8 launch

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FAIL

Re: A brilliant consumer experience in Windows

Oops. Some sort of award required for the analogy FAIL there.

The first mass-produced car, the Ford Model T, set the standard. The fact that at one time 50% of the entire world's cars were Model T's says it all here. In that car, the three pedals are one to switch gear ratios, one to engage reverse and a transmission brake. There is no clutch. Two levers operate the parking brake / neutral selector and the high/low ratio axle. The throttle is operated vis a lever on a quadrant attached to the steering column.

So in actual fact that car UI you are so fond of has undergone a major change. More than once. Go back a bit further and you find tiller steering control with hand operated brakes become rather more common than other mechanisms. Move on a bit and we get automatic transmissions (one fewer pedal), a wealth of parking brake options (hand operated with a variety of detents and positions, foot operated and now switch operated), automated chokeing / enrichment, also ignition advance / retard and more switchgear variations than you can shake a stick at.

Your bloke from the '30s would be rather puzzled by a modern car. How's it supposed to be started without a choke, an advance/retard lever and a starter button to press once you've turned it on with the key? Hang on, starter buttons are making a comeback, so he might be lucky on that one. Then again, if it were an auto he'd be a bit stuffed (Aha! "D" means "Forwards"...........???????).

Java won the smartphone wars (and nobody noticed)

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WTF?

Re: This story makes no sense at all.

"....uses Google's own proprietary and incompatible version of Java which therefore isn't really Java at all."

I was of the impression that the whole Oracle / Google shitfight was over the Java TCKs. You can't say it's "Java" without it getting the Test Compatibility Kit seal of approval and the TCKs are proprietary to Oracle, who reckon mobile devices should be restricted to the Mobile Edition and won't license 'em for testing on Android, so they're not allowed to run 'em........officially.

Nowhere have I seen it said that Android Java won't run the TCKs correctly, only that they're not allowed to stick the magic badge on it to say that it will.

What did I get wrong?

Ice island snaps off Greenland: Just a fifth the size of 1962 whopper

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"...a four-Manhattan berg...."

I just assumed that the Manhattan was a unit of thickness. Four Manhattans would be incredibly thick......

New lightest-ever material: Ideal power for electric car

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Re: Hotblack

Er, Hagunemnon battle-cruisers.....surely?

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Coat

Re: Maybe...but...

"....you could drive all day, and let it recharge overnight."

Or, if you are Roy Orbison, you can let it recharge during the day.

Joking aside, the 10 minute recharge time might just be achievable in the not too distant future. Batteries with an energy density that'll produce an electric car having 1500km range and still somewhere to sit people inside it are rather less likely.

Pyrotechnic boffin poised to light LOHAN's fire

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Happy

Re: "The solution? A more potent igniter"

....and if it still won't go in, spray it with WD40 and then hit it again.

Heating with an oxyacetylene torch until a brightly glowing cherry red colour is achieved and then belting the living daylights out of it with a sledgehammer is the nuclear option[1].

[1] If you happen to be a nuclear physicist with access to a decent amount of high-grade fissile material, your opinion may differ here. However, it should be pointed out that reducing your trivial engineering problem and a wide surrounding area to radioactive slag in a fit of pique counts as admitting defeat.

McDonalds staff 'rough up' prof with home-made techno-spectacles

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WTF?

Must be endemic in France.

There was I thinking it was just "Les Flics" who were in the habit of dishing out a good, solid jackbooted stamp to any piece of electronics in your posession that they didn't like the look of. Now I see this.

Maybe they're just all Bolshie LudditesFrench?

New 'Madi' cyber-espionage campaign targets Iran AND Israel

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Re: "Mahdi", not "Madi"

It's not the Messiah, it's a very naughty program.

Microsoft 'didn't notice' it had removed Browser Choice for 17 months

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Facepalm

So nobody noticed.....

.....apart from the Eurocrats?

<Slow handclap>

The EU. Pissing your money on the wall in a pointless bureaucracy-fest since 1993[1]. They'll probably end up fining MS again, we'll pay for it indirectly in higher prices somewhere and they'll spend the cash on hiring a load of quants to analyse cattle hoof health surveys, a new institute to foster better relations with Ghanaian squirrel-farmers, more plushly appointed carriages to cosset their backsides on the Brussels-Strasbourg run, or similar......

[1] It was called something else before that. Pick your favourite from "Common Market", "European Community", "European Economic Community", Fourth Reich.......etc ad nauseum.

FAIL - the most incompetent IT pros

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Re: @Mephistro (was: FAIL - the most incompetent IT pros)

Pump fires. Yup, I recall "Brainiac" doing this on TV.

They took on the "Do mobile phones really present a risk at petrol stations?" thing. The technique they adopted was to slosh a shedload of petrol around inside a caravan and then ring a mobile left inside it.

Nothing happened.

They tried with ever increasing numbers of mobiles rung simultaneously and got nothing.

Then, in a fit of pique, they ran a copper wire from just shy (spark gap) of the caravan's stove to outside and got some bloke to stand in a plastic bucket while wearing a nylon shell suit and jiggle about for a bit. Finally they handed him the end of the copper wire:

<KABOOM>

Raspberry Pi used as flight computer aboard black-sky balloon

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Re: silly questions...

No big.

I'm sure that getting a pi in the mush somewhere between the limo and the hall is a recognised occupational hazard for anyone on the Mastery side of things.