* Posts by TeeCee

9433 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007

Amazon cloud knocked out by violent storms in Virginia

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Facepalm

".....load balance across multiple cloud suppliers."

So, now we get VCs chucking a load of money at solving problems that the whole cloud thing was supposed to solve in the first place. i.e. scalability and redundancy.

I do so love slapping a cobbled-up patch over the obvious holes rather than fixing something so it does what it's bloody supposed to do. Still, stops things getting so simple that anyone can understand 'em and keeps us all in work I guess, so there is a bright side.

Is this cloud of clouds going to be THE cloud first thought of, or will we need more than one of these to stop it all falling on its arse too?

Naked Scarlett Johansson pic snatch 'is worth 6 years' porridge'

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Alert

Hang on.

Who in their right mind would get a load of candid shots of themselves and then punt 'em to their mates over an insecure web service, knowing full well that such would be dynamite to the tabloids? What would be the motivation?

Maybe they ought to be paying him for acting as the middle man in their transparently obvious attempts to seek cheap publicity.

Google Drive IOS or Dropbox

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Intercept strategy.

Hmm, the Android version of Dropbox has Camera upload to Dropbox as a configurable item. I turned it off when it prompted me with the setup options at first use. I'm sort of vaguely tempted to turn it on to see if it's as annoying as you say........................actually no, I'm not tempted at all.

Likewise the Windows version apparently has the option to automagically upload pics to Dropbox in the standard dialogue when it detects a drive / camera / tyrannosaur / whatever full of pics. Since I selected "Take no action" for things with pics and reinforced that by unchecking the "Annoy the shit out of me every time I do this" option eons ago, I don't see it.

ICANN’s archery contest misses its target

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Happy

Re: Do I hear $12,000,001 anywhere?

Ooooooooooo, using High-Frequency Trading systems for bid-sniping on eBay?

I like it!

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Facepalm

No, the new TLDs will be valid and things should still work.

Unelss of course some pillock has decided that a DNS lookup to check an address' validity is too much like hard work, elected instead to hard-code a list of "valid TLDs" and elected to do so in code rather than referring to an easily maintainable list of such somewhere.

That would fall under the umbrella of; "You broke it, so you can bloody well fix it.".

Microsoft: Don't overclock Windows 8 unless you like our new BSOD

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Holmes

Yup, I think you have it.

<--- Straight out of this school.

Chrome hits iPhone and iPad, storms to top of download chart

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Re: How about some chrome loving

You're not missing anything. I just ripped it off my ICS phone as it's not as good as the stock Android browser.

Too many pregant pauses in operation, very laggy at screen reorientation, no way I could find to get the bar to autohide like the stock app so that the page being viewed occupies the whole screen.

All in all, I reckon it's a WIP and probably needs another major release or two to become a candidate for being the default browser on Android. Good work for a first attempt though, I have to give it that.

Nexus 7 and Surface: A bonanza for landfill miners

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Re: 's what happens with locked in content

"as all my content is locked into iTunes, I cant't access most of it without some work, therefore I don't want to mess with it."

<THWACK> (Nail on head).

Trouble is, that probably sums up the attitude of the vast majority of the tablet-buying public....

Ex-NASA group plans private, crowd-funded asteroid hunter

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Re: <40m

Yes, but there would still be a lot of other people around to go: "Ooooo, that was nasty", an effect you don't get with the big ones.

Small town with significant hole in it = Oopsie.

Total extinction = A Big Fat Hairy Deal.

We can address the concerns of the "Even one death is one too many" merchants after we've ensured the survival of the species.

Apple patent may foretell an end to iPhone autocorrect Tourette's

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WTF?

Re: Been there.

"chat pose"......."/me preens you."

I see your problem. We're just getting to the stage where computers can recognise English words in context reliably. You're a bit ahead of the game in expecting them to handle complete and utter bleedin' cobblers with any degree of accuracy.

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Coat

I ponies art rubble fish?

WTF are you on about?

Just how do you build the perfect Olympic stadium?

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Happy

Pompeii: "Everyone went.”

Which just goes to show that, if you want bums on seats, two big blokes hacking chunks off each other with swords is a better bet than athletics.....

Friggin Giant Ugly Microsoft Ads!

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Happy

Re: Souls for rent

I take it that they didn't read the small print in the contract then?

3D is the future of cinema?

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Re: 3D is the future of cinema?

Mark Kermode had an idea?

He needs to look after it. It's probably lonely and very afraid, having come into existance only to find itself in a very strange place.

Darwin alarmed by six-legged mutant cane toad

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WTF?

Re: with apologies to Matt Groening

You've found an eight-legged one?

News Corp proposes divorce, Murdoch will look after TV biz

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Coat

Re: 168 year old redtop

Same method used by the witches in "Stardust".

It's all done by repeated attempts to suck the life out of the Star.

Menage á tablet: Apple vs Amazon vs Google

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Facepalm

Re: new tablet battleground? really?

Might be an issue for the UK but over in Europe, if you use a Kindle or Kindle app, you get pointed at the US store and there's nothing you can do about it, short of jiggery-pokery with UK proxies. Insult heaped upon injury here is that the US store only serves US editions. In dollars. Very bloody clever, I'm sure.

If anyone knows Jeff Bezos, could you kick him firmly in the nuts for me and then, while he's reduced to an enforced immobile heap on the floor, explain what the EU is and what "Free movement of goods and services" means? Thanks.

Mighty ROBOT achieves total SUPREMACY over feeble humans

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Happy

Re: Rock, Paper, Scissors.......

I believe that's now "Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock, Does not compute, Blown fuse".

Google wingmen rain Project Glass on San Francisco

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Mushroom

Re: Project Glass aside...

Meanwhile, in the real world.

ICS still has that "6/10 please try harder" thing going for it. (Attenuated voice dial prompts, WTF?? - fixed by enthusiasts in 4.0.3, still missing from vanilla today. EAP authentication broken since 2.1 and still not fixed. Etc ad nauseum.)

Map cacheing. Whoop de do! Meanwhile, every other satnav product has done offline maps since Jesus was a lad. If you're playing catchup, try doing so in less than a decade, it's supposed to be a fast-moving business this.

G+ is an irrelevance, which is hard to achieve in a category of online hangouts for sad bastards, so I suppose that's some sort of genius at work.

What are you, some sort of fruit fanboi who's been seduced by the dark side??

Oh and as an Android ICS user, even I have to admit that the WinPho UI pees all over both the latest Android and iOS ones for usability. Hard to bear as I just shelled a load of wonga on a new 'droid.....

Administrator eyes DVR firesale after TVonics collapse

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Meh

Probably because their loyal customers soldier on with the old SD version of their kit rather than buying a new model......

Facebook replaces non-Facebook mail addresses on Timeline

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Coat

Re: Andriod

Yup, you'd have to be a zucker for punishment to do that.

Sony SmartWatch Android remote

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Re: Wristband

"Normally with a watch you just leave it on and hardly take it off...."

There was I thinking that "normally" you took the ruddy thing off at night, before showering, etc. I certainly do.

Can't quite see why the strap would wear more when it's worn less though.......

The fact that it has an entirely proprietary strap, which is almost certain to be both expensive and completely unavailable by the time the first one goes, is a real deal-breaker. Having to bin a fairly pricey watch, purely 'cos you can't nip into a shop for a new strap every few years, is just daft.

Ford touts tech to bottle up traffic jams

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Happy

Cyclists.

I'm sure that if you switch it on when there are cyclists around, it'll still work. More importantly, you'll be doing your bit to help other Ford drivers too.

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Re: LOL Ford

Very few manufacturers do. What they used to do was flip the picture so it looked like it was a RHD car.

What stopped 'em was going all "contact us via teh inathtoobes". This caused a deluge of idle pedantry pointing out that the number plate was barse-ackwards. This is something that most people aren't arsed enough to write a letter about, but will happily thumb a smug tweet unto The Great Electronic Deafness upon spotting.

NASA counts down to nuclear tank invasion of Mars

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Coat

You can tell it's a government-funded project. They're using reasoned engineers to design their ridiculous crazy shit, rather than saving money by just getting unemployable lunatics to do it.

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Facepalm

Re: Excuse my ignorance...

Er, no. Not when the thing then descends until the rover's wheels hit the dirt some 21-and-some feet below it isn't.

UoM is unimportant too. As long as tether length < distance to ground at deployment, everything's fine. No need for any exactitudality[1] on this one.

[1] While I'm being unusually positive and friendly toward the yanks, I might as well go the extra mile and use the language.

'Inexperienced' RBS tech operative's blunder led to banking meltdown

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Facepalm

Re: no backup of the schedule?

1) Even experienced people drop a bollock sometimes. A colleague of mine had over 15 years experience of the systems concerned when he heroically deleted the entire environment for ${country}. Yup, a whole machine's application set and data down the crapper in one misplaced rm -rf *. Longest recorded ohnosecond in history.

2) When you're in rolling back from upgrade mode, you tend to be playing with O/S commands and infrastructure utilities, not user software. There are many things around at that level in most environments which do stuff quite capable of ruining your day without asking. It's sort of assumed that the type of person allowed to play with them is allowed to use the sharp scissors. However, as we see in (1), even the best of us drop a clanger occasionally.

Net publishing happens in the server AND the eyeball, says EU Bot

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Alert

Re: Just a thought...

Interesting one.

I suppose that one could argue that with IP geolocation it is possible to make efforts to prevent[1] publication in the USA and Iran. If no such efforts on restriction are made then it could be taken that the intent is to provide access to the data and facilitate publication everywhere.....

Pass the popcorn....

[1] Subject to circumvention of course, but in these cases it usually is the thought that counts.

Stonehenge WASN'T built by ALIENS - Boffins' shock claim

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Re: I call Bollocks

You call bollocks, they call "ritual significance".

What that actually means is; "We haven't got a fucking clue, but that isn't going to stop us making shit up and arguing the toss about it 'til the cows come home.".

Not a lot of difference really.

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Unhappy

Re: Sir

What? To get charred sausages, beer and women with no knickers you need a plain full of megaliths?

Damn. I need a bigger garden.

Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all, new field data show

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WTF?

Re: Seal Data

Have you ever seen an Elephant seal?

It's more likely to be nice clubbing man[1] who gets skewed.....

[1] Not sure that blowing a whistle and shouting: "ACIIIIIIIIIIIIIID" while dancing like a loon is an effective seal-hunting method.

Google unwraps cloudy personnel/fleet tracking via Droid

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Holmes

G+ mandatory?

"....we wouldn't put it past the Googleplex to expect all participants to be signed up to Google+."

A fair guess. I'm already thinking that the number of times the Choccy lads' various offerings try to push G+ when I'm using 'em is beginning to look suspiciously like the actions of an organisation in abject panic.

At least I can ignore Farcebook and Twatter without other applications spamming me about how much I'm missing out all the time.

Apple's iPhone 5 connector said to be a control freak

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Re: People use connectors?

"....as we have phone sync war when both of us sit in the car."

Some quality FAIL from Ford there. Parott solved this one years ago with their BlueTooth kits[1]. Multiple phones configured, but one is set as the preferred one, which takes precedence when two or more of its paired devices are detected.

Of course, this does mean that when I use the wife's car it often pairs with hers in the house rather than mine in the car, but a few yards up the road it sorts itself out. I just need to get round to updating the firmware[2] so the voice dialling works on Android[3], rather than just hanging as it does now.

[1] The yardstick by which such are measured.

[2] The other reason why Parott's products are a better approach than any manufacturer offers.

[3] Can't really blame Parott here. Android's voice dialling over BlueTooth is, without a doubt, the crappiest offering ever made in this area. Getting it to work at all took me back as it was highly reminiscent of getting ${obscure_hardware} working on ${early_linux_version}.

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Happy

Re: Hmm...

Works the other way around too.

Many years ago, a mate returned to his car in the company car park to find a crowd standing around. A new Fiesta had been broken into and had its radio nicked.

All his eye-wateringly expensive Pioneer kit was present and correct. Still installed in his rusty old Austin Allegro parked next to the Fiesta........

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Re: Borrowed a design book from Sony?

Still on the first one here.

No 2 son dropped it while it still had a cable plugged in the other day. Turns out that the charger socket is simple to replace. Shame he had the headphones in, that one's a bit of a bitch to get at.

Sony kit does seem to be way more DIY-maintenance friendly than most. As a result, parts availability is also good.

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Re: How about Apple spend some time fixing the damn power cables?

<Disembodied voice from above>

Move house!

It's not that big of a deal.

</Disembodied voice from above>

Why the Windows Phone 8 digi-wallet is different to the others

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That solution seems to come in two flavours.

You can either choose your handset very carefully and hope that its makers current commitment to upgrades continues in the future.

Or you can end up like one of my collegues, running a port of a later version actually aimed at a similar handset, that makes the Assyrian Empire look stable.....

Kodak's using bankruptcy to rob us of our rights – Apple

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Facepalm

Re: Isnt this what contract law is for?

A "gentleman's agreement" between a rapacious litigant and a patent troll.

It was always going to end in tears really.

Alan Turing 100: Visionary, war winner ... game maker?

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Unhappy

Re: Sir

I reckon that it could have been done.

The problem is that by the nineties, nobody would have really given a stuff that a computer on one end of a terminal couldn't be reliably distinguished from a person on one end of a terminal. Nobody outside of academia would have seen the point without it also handling a natural speech interface.

No chance of a press-friendly article on success = no funding to do it.

Why do women pick IT as a career ?

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Re: Put me down as a chauvinist

"....women seem to be the main consumers of crossword magazines....."

You may be reading too much into that. My wife's quite fond of the "trash mags" full of prize puzzles. The most complex crosswords in those make the Daily Mail's quick crossword look like The Times' cryptic offering for complexity.

Microsoft rejects Google-Moto patent pact proposal

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Re: Google are going to get royally screwed over this

FRAND terms generally apply to something essential to implement a standard.

Slide to unlock is a) not a standard de jure, although it may well be de facto and b) non-essential to the device, there being umpteen ways to skin that cat. Whether something that trivial and obvious should be patentable at all is arguable, but it's definately not a candidate for FRAND licensing.

'People should be free from Peeping Toms' snapping pics of them!

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Coat

Re: @djack

So, what you're saying here is that the jarring use of "one's" and "your" in context after "People" are incorrect and thus sic erat scriptum?

Vutures 1, Pedants 0. Change ends and new ballsups please.

Imagine a pedantic grammar nazi putting a coat on and leaving at this point......

Arts & social-sci students briefly forced to do useful work at Foxconn

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Happy

Re: Students perform tasks like trimming the edges off a mobile phone

So those rounded corners are actually hand-rounded from boring old rectangles by liberal arts student slaves?

To hell with mechanised mass-production, that's real quality for you.

Firefox 'new tab' feature exposes users' secured info: Fix promised

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Facepalm

Seriously?

The new tab thumbnails are based on users' browsing history. All information is contained within the browser and can be deleted at any time.

So the new tab thumbnail feature isn't capturing any new data, it's just shining a glaring light on the fact the ruddy browser stores HTTPS session data anyway?

This is better how exactly?

FCC boss applauds moves to block UN internet control

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Facepalm

Re: UN has a better track record than USA

The UN couldn't organise a pissup in a brewery, even if someone else sorted out the taxis for them. Every decision made has to be watered down to cater for the various nations with an axe to grind and anything even remotely constructive gets vetoed.

Imagine the internet being run by a UN committee. Now roll on a few years to when Iran, North Korea or somesuch gets the chair via the usual UN selection process of "Buggins' Turn"........

Also imagine where we'd be with IPv6 if it had to be approved by the various nations. If the UN were already running this, I'd be gobsmacked if they had the first draft of the standard out yet.

The old gag about a camel is that it is a horse designed by a committee. You can tell it wasn't a UN committee as the bloody thing's got four legs.

Mars has more water than thought

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Re: Comets watered Earth

Arrest those comets! There's a hosepipe ban.

Vatican subtly shifts its position on The Blues Brothers

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I'm guessing.....

.....they're still not endorsing "Dogma"?

Major London problem hits BT broadband across southeast

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Key word here is "Redundancy".

As in:

a) What should be in place to prevent a piece of equipment failing having this level of impact.

b) What should happen to the person responsible for the lack of it.

Larry Ellison buys island 1000x bigger than Branson's

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Alert

Look out Lanai!

"...looking forward to partnering with the people of Lanai to chart the island's future,"

Just out of interest, when you're made redundant from your position as "person of an island", what happens next?

Pegatron named as Microsoft Surface fondleslab foundry

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Re: demonstrate the strengths and capabilities of the new Windows 8

I have to agree. Certainly on phones that Metro interface would seem to be the mutt's nuts and makes the "Home screen(s) 'n icons" approach elsewhere seem decidedly clunky by comparison.

I rather regret my recent Android purchase as I, slightly more recently, bought a WinPho device for my son. It's a better UI, a much better UI. It also manages to feel more consistantly smoother and fluid in transitions, despite the unit it's running on having nowhere near the horsepower of mine. Now, if they'd just put WinPho on something less stodgily Scandic in design, I think they'd have a winner. Having played with the devices, I reckon its Nokia letting MS down rather than the other way around here.

With that experience, I fully expect Win 8 to be a damned good thing on tablets too. I might just punt for an ARM one. It does stink on the desktop, as you say, though........