* Posts by TeeCee

9433 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007

Chell clips Cant to top Play School presenter slot

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Coelacanth?

No, Brian Canth. I'm hith brother.....

(God alone knows why I remember that.)

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Coat

Every other person in Essex is called Brian?

The things you learn around here, eh?

World of Warcraft subscriptions slip

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Simple really.

Old lags at the top eventually get cheesed off with paying subs, cheesed off with buying expansions, cheesed off with repeated account pwnage being ignored by Blizzard or discover the multiplayer version of sex and leave.

N00bs at the bottom get turned off by wandering around amidst hordes of gold farming meatbots and don't bother going any further.

Subscriptions fall.....

Nvidia outs five-core ARM chip

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WTF?

<snip>

"....the QNX® Neutrino® RTOS brings a potent mix of speed, reliability, and flexibility to the new BlackBerry® Tablet OS from RIM...."

<snip>

That'll be the same BB Tablet that's currently being marketed as a stonkingly overpriced Flash appliance, yes? As RIM would seem to think that this is their only selling point, you'd like to think it at least existed......

Russian Mars mission launches after multi-year delays

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Happy

Actually Mars is an easy target. It's *not* hitting it at full pelt that's the tricky bit.......

New pics of giant black sphere hurtling toward Earth

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Meh

"..described as being blacker than charcoal..."

Now I know how the Romans felt when *they* were invaded by Goths.....

The Register Guide on how to stay anonymous (part 2)

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"Like trying to kill Steven Seagal"

So a truckload of pies and waiting a bit should do it then?

Elite DARPA cyber heroes will protect interwebs

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FAIL

Standards are slipping.

"...the agency also announced an elite cyber team of experts to combat online threats."

What, no humungous vat of nutrient solution full of wetwired monkey brains, hooked to the internet and foiling / retaliating against cyber threats in picoseconds?

Shame on you DARPA......

New plastic telescope ammo machine gun is light as a rifle

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So where does the heat go then?

The thing that has kept brass cased ammo around and the, theoretically vastly superior, caseless variety in the lab, is that the brass casing takes a lot of heat with it when it's ejected.

Now I can that the insulating plastic case keeps the heat out of the breech, a good thing, but that heat has to end up somewhere. Presumably more of it heads off down the barrel and out the business end, but that surely implies more heat in the barrel and associated barrel heating problems?

Comp-sci boffin aims to REPROGRAM LIFE ITSELF

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Joke

Professor Krasnogor

I suppose that with a name like that, creating evil mutant monsters to destroy the world is the only career option open really......

Compact Disc death foretold for 2012

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WTF?

Remind me again.....

......when was the death of vinyl supposed to occur?

Also in 2012: death of COBOL, year of Linux desktop, end of world, UN campaign to provide every forest-dwelling bear with a flush toilet.

"....music site Side-Line which says it heard whispers...". So not just bullshit, but rumoured bullshit.

Record flight is step toward HYPERSONIC SPACE AIRSHIP

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Happy

Alternatively, anyone know what the current world record is for longest piece of elastic?

I'm thinking *seriously* extreme bungee jumping.

Swiss boffins produce working cloth made of GOLD

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Ultimate status symbol....

......for the tasteless uber-wealthy oil sheik set.

Gold bog roll......

Hackers commandeer US government satellites

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Coat

Place a large bet with Ladbrokes on the imminent outbreak of World War III and collide it with a Chinese government one?

Stallman: Did I say Jobs was evil? I meant really evil

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WTF?

"Richard Stallman's speaking tour rider...."

I'm now trying to work out whether that's genuine and extremely sad, or just one of the most awesome piss-takes of all time......

We like zombies… because we are zombies

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Happy

".. zombies have no controller, they have no hope of ever being free."

So any slight pangs of guilt you might feel as you blow their heads off or engage in a spatterfest with miscellaneous farm implements are misplaced then?

Result!

Cops find hackers' phone in NOTW office

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I think that actually the Digger has an extremely powerful moral magnet, so he can keep the lads' moral compasses pointing in the most convenient direction.

Mozilla delivers Binged-up Firefox browser

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"Mozilla signed a financial agreement......"

Bribed by a big Bing bung.......

AMD CEO vows 'maniacal' chip-baking fix

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Faildozer?

AMD release a chip aimed fair and square at heavily threaded server loads.

A load of enthusiast sites grab one, run a load of lightly threaded desktop/gaming benchmarks over it and find that, er, it's not very good at that sort of thing. Guess what? Bears shit in the woods too.

When the promised desktop variant ships with its clocks upped, more cache and a ceepie-geepie "Fusion" setup to push FP performance, then we can start to judge.....

Sony KDL-40HX723 40in LED 3D TV

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LCD TV.

Viewing angles? That's usually the Achilles' heel of the tech and it ought to be stated in any review how far off "dead ahead" you can go before it gets really crap.

Hopefully the HX series is rather better in this regard than the EX, which are bloody awful.

Machine translation cracks 18th century occult cipher

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WTF?

Hmm.

A German Secret Society with a penchant for eye-related things.

So it's the Bavarian Illuminati then?

Google Maps API now costs $4 per 1,000 requests

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Devil

Business model.

1) Free sample.

2) Bigger free sample.

3) When customer is hopelessly hooked to product, charge for it.

Next week: A consortium of crack peddlars launch a class action against Google over the theft of their IP.

Inside WD's flooded Thai factory

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Facepalm

When I first came here.....

.....this was all flood plain. Everyone said I was daft to build a hard disk plant on a flood plain, but I built it all the same, just to show them. It flooded......

Avira anti-virus labels itself as spyware

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Happy

I, for one.....

......welcome Avira's practical demonstration of how to disappear up your own arse.

Man builds smartphone dock into arm

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Alert

Not quite so handy for scratching your balls though.......

Jaguar recalls over 17,600 X-types in the UK

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Before the "elf 'n safety" types chime in....

Jag are probably right about the impact and it'll still disengage cruise when the brakes are touched, as that control is implemented "hard" rather than "soft", for obvious reasons. They'd be shitting bricks otherwise, rather than playing it down.

The fact that they allege no customers have noticed quite probably means that the actual cruise functions (set, suspend, resume, up, down) are all OK and it's just that you sometimes can't turn the damned thing off. Any Jag owners care to comment?

Personally I favour the GM system, which has no on/off control. It's always there when you want it, effectively sat permanently in the "unset" state if unused.

Web czar: 'Drag your nan online'

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Joke

That's just so typical of the elderly.

Always have to do things the old-fashioned way, no matter how obsolete. Never move with the times. My Grandmother used a copper posser and a mangle to do her washing 'til the day she died........sheesh.

What flash needs is a little TLC

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Joke

Oh I dunno, the other Flash does a sterling job on the tiles in my bog[1].

Maybe you mean the other, other Flash?

[1] Top tip: Don't mix it with the Cillit stuff or you get an explosion and a bright light and then a SWAT team storms your house.

Apple shouldn't bother with TV...

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FAIL

Which is why they'd be barking.

The success of Apple under Jobs was in spotting something newish and good that wasn't being "done right" and producing a "right" version.

Everyone knew what was wrong with MP3 players; the cruddy User Interface and the inconvenience of getting music onto them. Apple fixed that.

Everyone knew what was wrong with smartphones; buggy, unreliable, underpinned with cruddy OEM drivers, byzantine UIs, no updates after sale and a vertiable diaspora of application sources. Apple fixed that, although I have to add here that I reckon that RIM fixed that one first and just forgot to sell it.

What's wrong with your telly? Everyone else has had donkey's to work on this one. If anything, the trend here is towards a panel, a source (cable, sat, Apple TV, BD, whatever), a sound system and to work toward interoperation between manufacturers. Producing a "walled garden" solution here looks suspiciously like swimming against the tide. Also here, producing one "ideal" telly ain't going to work. Size *is* important.......

Google dumps + from Boolean search tool

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Happy

Dear "Customers"[1],

We suspect you may be missing who owns our search engine and who's paying for it. If you don't like it, please try not to let the door hit your arse on the way out.

Yours Sincerely,

Google

[1] In quotes because......oh fuck, our heads just exploded.

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I think it's cos this one's produced so many long faces......

US radio evangelist: Apocalypse now

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WTF?

Damn!

I was stuck in a training course last week and missed this completely 'til now.

Anyone know when the next one's due?

I'd also like to know where Mr Camping gets his bibles from. All the ones I've seen appear to be missing the bit where it says; "Raptures will be scheduled on an ad-hoc basis throughout the early part of the 21st Century. Exact numbers and timings to be dependant on demand."

Microsoft trousers yet more royalties from Android gear

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Absolutely correct. The bit most people appear to be missing is that they are under no obligation whatsoever to disclose any of 'em to *you* or, for that matter, me.

Part of the licensing arrangement, for those who actually need to see them, is an NDA.

Given the willingness of the Big Boys who have seen 'em to cough up, you have to say that whichever ones are at the heart of the Android licensing are sound to the extent of not being even worth *trying* to contest.

Massive study concludes: 'Global warming is real'

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WTF?

"....funded in part by a pair of US oil billionaires...."

<crusty eco-tosser>

Aha, funded by Big Oil!! Obviously a massive con to discredit the ecological movement and the fact that these figures appear to show that the earth is warming proves that it isn't!!!!

Oh.......hang on........<Head Explodes>

</crusty eco-tosser>

El Reg in email address blunder

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Joke

The joke's on you.

As a result of this, *I* now get to collect $65m from the estate of the late Colonel Gaddafi! I suspect that if that nice, god-fearing lawyer hadn't had my email address, he couldn't have got in touch with me.

You might have got the money if you hadn't been so careless.......

China punts free condoms at iPhone owners

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Joke

Surely, being rubber, it would also serve to insulate the antenna from your hand[1]?

[1] Stop laughing at the back there.....

Reg hack desperately seeks deeply frustrated pensioner

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Joke

Unfortunately.....

Mr Murdoch has now sobered up and vowed *never* to get that thoroughly ratarsed ever again.

Gulf of California terrorized by ONE-EYED MUTANT SHARK!

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Is this an Apple product?

iShark.......

MIT boffin: Salted disks hold SIX TIMES more data

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Joke

"table salt"

Seeing that term used to describe actual salt in a tech article confused me so much that I've just sprinkled a load of pseudo-random characters on my chips.....

Why so shy on pay-by-wave, Nokia?

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Alert

NFC payments.

Nokia could be playing it safe here. Let the others stick their heads over the parapet and wait to see which way the lawsuit dust settles when the inevitable happens.

Now it would seem to be obvious that, when the contents of some punter's bank account mysteriously disappears, the handset manufacturer can't be held liable[1]. However, we are talking about a process in which lawyers will probably be involved.......

[1] Then again, "we didn't design NFC payments, we only implemented it" does have a touch of the "Nuremburg defence" about it........

Sixth of Britain's cellphones have traces of poo on them

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But it's on everything we regularly put near our faeces......

Ubuntu's Oneiric Ocelot: Nice, but necessary?

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Thumb Up

"...more like something that might be useful one day."

Best piece of damning with faint praise I have seen for a while that.

Apple versus Samsung: key points in the ruling

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FAIL

Touch screen patents.

Once upon a time, some ingenious soul decided that it should be possible to tap a screen and have the device respond.

Everything since then has been evolutionary development, not innovation.

Apple's US bid to ban Samsung tabs hinges on design

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Devil

Oh that's just bloody great.

Someone please tell me how the fuck we got to the point where the shinyness of the plastic case is as / more important than the functionality of the device when it comes to differentiating products?

Future wars will be over water not fuel, warns Intel sage

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WTF?

Hmm.

This 'ere rental car has been taken by a previous hirer to this address!!

And the risk here is what exactly?

If Big Brother wants to know where you went in it, he'll just ask the ANPR database. Also, if that data *is* of any importance, wiping the unit's memory or having the address data stored elsewhere will make sod-all difference. Anyone with half a brain will just read the "deleted" log information from its flash memory before it's overwritten with new stuff.

OccupySF BOFH runs protest network on pedal power

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Power generation.

That looks to me like a conventional bike with its arse end propped in a frame so the rear wheel turns a roller.

Easy answer, replace the pedalling bit with a moped.

Energy minister gives grudging nuke endorsement

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FAIL

Except that for there to be any sort of "trap" to fall into there, there would have to be no other major developments in the next 30 years or so. E.g. to pluck an obvious one out of the air, workable Fusion power.

History is not on your side here.......

Microsoft whips Apple with global Xbox TV deals

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Flame

Fat bloody chance! It'll be IP geolocation locked like every other bloody thing.

Already the deal that MS has with the Beeb for its back catalogue is IP restricted to the UK......who can get the Beeb services anyway(!)

Now, you'd have thought that the "killer app" for TV delivery over the internet would be serving markets outside the usual availability of the programming in question. After all, if you are in the UK and want to see UK telly, you can bung an aerial on the roof, take a cable or put up a sat dish. No need for Xboxes, Apple wossanames or any other overly complex idiocies.

Apparently not and those elsewhere are restricted to dodgy usage of Sky, fannying around with proxies and the providers in a game of whack-a-mole, or trying to understand what it is that's so important about Chris Waddle........

Fretting Googler retracts anti-Google+ rant

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Joke

Slow news day?

"Bloke shoots mouth off while pissed as a fart. Apologises next day."

Other news: None.

Astronomy crowd spots PLANET KILLER!

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"....we have discovered Nibiru....."

Wait 'til Rag Week. That's the time you're most likely to find a clapped-out old Daewoo car stuck somewhere improbable.....