* Posts by TeeCee

9432 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007

Google attacks Twitter's search bias claim

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Mushroom But *you're* forgetting: "Twitter was reported to be asking for $30m to tap its real-time stream." So Twitter want to be *paid* 30m for the privilege of chucking their crap to the world. Now they're bitching that Google have elected not to pay 30m for their sewage........ They think it's unfair of Google not to pay them to publicise their service? "Foxtrot Oscar" is the right answer and Google could probably append "and the horse you rode in on" and still have the moral high ground here.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has a massive package

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Coat

True worth?

All well and good, but how many parking spaces does Mr Cook get to use?

Sony goes inorganic for 'eye popping' OLED TV rival

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Coat

"100 per cent of NTSC colour range..."

That's supposed to be a good thing?

It's not often said to stand for Never Twice the Same Colour for no reason.....

Astronomers map largest ever zone of dark matter

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Thumb Up

I think that Isaac Asimov summed up that second para perfectly. Something like:

"Contrary to popular belief, most important discoveries do not start with 'Eureka', but with 'That's interesting.......'."

Duff Russian Mars probe spotted flying in reverse

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Coat

Obligatory really.

In Russia, space probe reverse into you!

E-gambling tax will spark web bet shop exodus - report

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FAIL

Taxing the internet.

Yup, right up there with herding cats and nailing soup to the wall.

UNSW researcher creates four-atom silicon wires

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Coat

Cayman clips........

iOS 5's iMessage chops carrier SMS routing traffic

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WTF?

Yup, I LOL'd at that too.

I recall some years back TPTB were looking at moving to SMS for on-call alerts and sunsetting pagers.

I asked what the delivery times were for SMS and was told it was pretty much instant. I suggested they check that with the Telco. The answer came back that there was *no* guarantee of delivery at all, SMS was a low priority service and subject to other network traffic delaying it, it was *usually* within four hours and 99.something% within 24.

The other nail in the coffin was that they couldn't find a handset that eschewed "beep once" in favour of "raucous racket until acknowledged" for SMS arrival alerts.

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WTF?

"If they opened BBM up to other OS's then maybe it might have been."

And iMessage is open to.........?

Same old same old then I guess.

Parasites spark swarm of zombie bees

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<Snitch>

Sir, sir, D-A-M used the banned m-word sir!

</Snitch>

Apple coughs $5m for multitouch patents

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WTF?

"Not that Elan is a patent troll by any means....."

So they bought the patent, rather than coming up with it themselves, "for defence". Then they noticed they could screw money out of others with it by using it offensively and proceeded to do so.

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck.......

Whale versus shark in KIWI DEATH MATCH!

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Facepalm

Er, actually one of yer standard skool geography trivia bits is that Australia is unique in being a Country, a Continent *and* an Island, all at the same time.

The innate inability of Australia to decide what it is explains Barry Humphries.

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Joke

"....the dog seen harassing a shark in the video..."

Ah yes, the rare Massive Bollocked Nutterhound if I am not mistaken. They do that sort of thing you know.....

KIBOSH 'non lethal' sticky-bomb hits a car, fills it with gas

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Joke

Death to anyone who says "Death to anyone"!

Ohshi.......

+++

NO CARRIER

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Coat

Who is the Pink Oboe?

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KIBOSH

Kills Incidental, Black Ops Stay Handsclean.

Google tablet to tackle Kindle Fire not iPad

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All part of the strategy.

Google are loaded with cash and can easily afford to chuck pointless things at the market.

Once in a while one of them turns out to have a point, they make shitloads more cash and that funds the next round of the "suck it and see" cycle.

Man convicted of murder gets retrial after virus eats transcripts

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Thumb Down

So the rules are that both the hardcopy and electronic copy are generated, which she ignored rather than admit to not having enough paper rolls and (presumably) forcing a recess while more were obtained.

She also chose to delete the transcript from the steno machine before she'd lodged it in archive or taking a second copy, rather than coming back and doing so afterwards, ensuring that the only copy was on her own PC.

Conclusion: *She* did not back up properly, there's no "they" involved here. The anti-virus fuckup (if there was one - we could be in zero-day land here) is immaterial as disk failure, dropping the machine or a whole slew of other possibilities could have easily produced the same results.

Boffins glue self-righting ROBO-VELOCIRAPTOR tail to car

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Dunno about Motorbikes. However, I suspect that if you drove a plastic pig off a metre drop, the end result would be a rolling chassis covered in a heap of shattered fiberglass pieces regardless of which way up it landed.

Videogame piracy figures show decline

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Facepalm

"....that is always in memory, slowing down my PC and constantly using my capped broadband connection."

You've not thought to uncheck the "load on startup" box or right-click the tray icon and hit "Exit" then?

Ubuntu hoists skirt, flashes 'concept' gadget at CES

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Meh

What I want from a TV is a 50" plasma monitor with several HDMI ports, a couple of SCARTs for legacy, one or two component inputs, some decent speakers to avoid running up the surround system just to watch the news and a remote to adjust sound/picture settings and swap between inputs.

Trouble is, anything that fits the bill seems to be described as a TV and come with loads of other cruft bundled......

Microsoft celebrates the death of IE6

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Unhappy

Not sure that's an issue. AFAIR you can still download the full installation pack for 8 with a bent XP.

What might help more is if corp admins would allow those users who *don't* use HalfArsedAccountingShitApp 1.0 to upgrade, rather than defending their standard, IE6-ridden desktop image as if it were Holy Writ.

Darth Vader dies peacefully in hospital

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Maybe it was really Alec Guiness as Obi-Wan and Bob had been told not to make him look completely crap?

I certainly remember thinking when I first saw it that Vader looked like he knew what he was doing, but Obi-Wan quite obviously didn't have a Scooby.

Next-generation materials for post-Christmas repairs: Reg investigates

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Thumb Up

Best Araldite moment for me was using it as an emergency repair to a punctured carburettor float.

Most satisfying, both from the point of view of working out that the problem *was* a punctured carb float and that of working out that I could fix it with Araldite and get to use the car while I ordered a replacement[1].

Another common use for Araldite on cars was fuel tank repair. Steel petrol tanks rust through at the bottom due to water condensation accumulating over time. Rust pinholes are easily fixed by brushing off the rust and Aralditing a coin over the hole. One lad I knew had a car with a fuel tank base almost entirely constructed out of 2p bits and Araldite.

[1] Although with hindsight I could probably have stuck (hah!) with the Araldited one.

Rupert Murdoch and 'unverified' missus in Twitter tangle

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Joke

The Plaid Avenger?

"....an enlightener of American students on all things global." apparently.

Presumably somewhere in Hades, Sisyphus is looking at that and thinking that just maybe he hasn't got it so bad after all.....

NASA's twin GRAILs reunite in lunar orbit

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Coat

Top tip: Avoid micrometeorites.

After all, what use is a holey GRAIL?

Apple to appeal Italian warranty fine

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IIRC that's now enshrined in European law, along with the two years, courtesy of the British.

Again IIRC, the continentals were looking at making the standard practice that which was more common over here, where the manufacturer supports the warranty and the retailer's involvement ends with handing over their phone number.

Best description of that approach on the odd occasion I've had to deal with it was; "worse than fucking useless".

Solicitors from hell website unplugged by libel judge

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Black Helicopters

Would that be the same Cherie Booth who founded a chambers specialising in Human Rights cases, just as her husband rammed through a raft of labyrinthine and loophole-ridden legislation lacking defined scope, ensuring a healthy supply of long and highly profitable legal arguments on the subject in perpetuity?

Conflict of interest? Surely not.......

Well, burn my atomic-clock-powered new human renaissance platform

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Facepalm

Worse than that. Next time he's caught writing fictitious bollocks, his shiny new qualification will reinforce his shield of self-righteous smugness tenfold.

Apple’s Siri gets sweary with British child

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Facepalm

I remember a mate telling me that he and a colleague were developing a system and had become bored with the error messages while testing it. To relieve the tedium they played silly B's with the error message data table, with an incentive of free beer for the one making the other laugh out loud in the office. A rich vein of comedic material was supplied by the fact that the client was a Merchant Banker.

Their boss learned the value of checking with the developers before demoing the unfinished system to the client the hard way......

Latest El Reg project: Rise of the Robot Sheep

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Facepalm

Rise of the Robot Sheep?

Tsk, tsk, tsk.

Any fule kno that the correct term is *Electric* Sheep.....

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WTF?

"...I'm composting the clippings back into the yard, thickening the sod."

Allowing the clippings to remain on the lawn creates what's referred to in gardening circles as "thatch". This causes waterlogging of the surface, which destroys the root mat and kills the lawn.

Compost the clippings elsewhere and dig the results into the flower beds where it'll do some good. Best thing for the lawn is to go over it with a fork, making rows of holes, followed by a light dusting of sand. This then washes into the holes made by the fork tines and improves the flow of moisture through the surface, preventing waterlogging of the root mat.

No, I do not know how I know that.......

Online Christmas orders from retailers go titsup

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Facepalm

Online grocery shopping fubar?

I have the perfect solution to this problem. It's a documented process I like to call; "Get off your fat, lazy arse and go to the shops.".

I think I'll apply for a patent, as nobody else appears to have thought of it....

A simple HTML tag will crash 64-bit Windows 7

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Joke

Easy one. They missed unchecking the "Install loads of other shiteware" box when installing iTunes for their new iPhone, it's made itself the default browser and they don't know how to undo that.

Only good reason I can think of.....

CERN: 'New physics starts now'

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Alien

Great. Now we get to be exterminated by pissed-off aliens covered in sand......

Apple's Galaxy Tab ban was best advertising ever - Samsung

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Lost Sales.

"...resulting in a loss to sales that McGee refused to put a number to."

I'm not surprised. Whatever it was it's going to be peanuts compared to the honking increase in sales now, courtesy of all the free hype from Apple.

Stolen, remote-wiped iPhones still get owner's iMessages

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Unhappy

"The flaw was spotted by one David Hovis....."

I only managed to read that far, after that everything was drowned out by Dvořák's Symphony No. 9.........

Nearest supernova since 1986 blasts boffin off her chair

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Good point. Now we know it's there, all we need to do is look for them arriving before the light. To measure this, we just need to go back in time.............ah..........hang on.........

P2P veterans sue the Cloud ... for copying their stuff

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WTF?

So freetards grow up to be patent trolls?

For some reason my irony-o-meter (tm) has just gone up in flames.

Learning about chip design from Silicon Roundabout

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Mushroom

I do not recall any Dr Who ever wearing a coat made out of a rejected Ikea rug design.

Cambridge puts Isaac Newton's notes online

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Hmm.

Judging by the number of pages intentionally left blank, it's not Apple he has to worry about but IBM.....

Durban failed: Relax, everyone

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FAIL

Ah, it's all political.

New Climate change treaty? Nope.

Funding? Nope.

Economic growth restrictions? Nope.

Trade rules? Nope.

Load of wankwords advertising a free bunfight next year? Ah, yes. We can agree on that.

Anyone know what the point was?

Windows Defender Offline: For PCs too hosed to go online

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Maybe, but I just *hate* to accept that some scrote's got the better of me and admit defeat.

In some cases I've dealt with it might actually have been quicker to reinstall, but nowhere near as satisfying.

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Facepalm

You'd have to be a bit thick to generate the boot disk on the machine that's infected anyway.

Then again, you'd have to be a bit thick to have thumped the "yes please" button when that message came up offering to install a FREE!!111!!! Secuitry Scanrer......

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FAIL

Except of course that this thing boots standalone. Thus your postulated virus that takes out Windows Defender isn't running at the time.

Four Romanians charged with hacking 150 Subway shops

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Coat

What's the chance that it's: "Subway123".......

Yahoo! may! never! see! a! penny! of! $610m! anti-spam! win!

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Joke

Advanced fee fraud is perpetrated by MCFF[1] accredited technicians.

[1] Microsoft Certified Fee Fraudster.

El Reg takes man for romantic weekend for two at Intel chip factory

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Pint

"..taking in the sites of the city on the Liffey..."

I believe that this is more commonly known as; "Getting properly wankered on Guiness."

Senators: Globo-domains could mean consumer chaos

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Joke

"US senators......fears that it may lead to cybersquatting..."

Anyone fancy clubbing together for ".usa"?

RED MOON to GO DARK tonight in Pacific eclipse

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Joke

Eclipse description.

"...bright orange, or even copper-colored, with a possible hint of turquoise at the edge,"

He's a bloody Mac user isn't he?