Posts by TeeCee

American Apparel's tags start tracking your pants

@Rich

Hmm, I never thought I'd have a use for the phrase "fly-zip lightning storm", but that's El Reg comments for you.

Paris, because of the obvious scorched crotch connection.

Downing Street removes Labour Party link

@Steve Woods

No, those are the ones he gives with his mouth open. The political ones are given with the mouth closed (or, more usually, miming along) as he's actually talking from the other end.....

HTC S730 Windows Mobile smartphone

Weather auto update?

Er, my Touch has this. Tap on the city, this takes you to the list of cities. Tap on "menu", bottom right, and "weather options". There's yer automatic update settings.

So it's there on the Touch and probably the Dual too. Maybe you just didn't find it?

The missing five-minute Linux manual for morons

@Matt Bryant

You swine! You mentioned DOS EDIT. All well and good, but this lead me to think about DOS editors and thus remember EDLIN.

I thought I'd safely forgotten that and I now need to gibber insanely in a corner for a few hours followed by a stiff drink, a long lie down and some electroshock therapy.

There ought to be a law against saying things that could potentially remind people of EDLIN.........

The white one with the very long sleeves and the fetching leather strap accessories please.

@Peter Kay

So, vi's big problem is that it's difficult with Dvorak keyboards? I've got news for you, if you cut all your fingers off and feed 'em through a mincer before using it it's bleedin' impossible.

But then, why would you want to.........?

Joking aside, the .exrc is your friend. I'll bet a quick search will find a nice pre-prepared one for you to play with.

Intel Core 2 Duo T9500 mobile 'Penryn' processor

@Rik

...a point which I thought was well made in the article when it was pointed out that the CPU was hammered in testing and you could probably double the battery life figures for less intense use.

More pertinent might be to wonder who on Earth would shell out the thick end of two grand on a gaming laptop to run office apps on though?

Top-end Fords will be watching your rear

Bloody marvellous.

Now when following a Ford I won't only need dark glasses ('cos every Ford ever made drives around with its fog lamps continually lit) and, if it's a Focarse, a crystal ball ('cos the brake lights are positioned above yer natural line-of-sight if you're driving anything lower than a LandRover), I'll need a bleedin' tinfoil hat as well!

I've often wondered if Ford deliberately design cars to attract being thumped firmly up the arse so they get to sell replacements to insurance companies......

A week in the life of Open XML

FFS people!

It's a standard. Feel free to either use it or ignore it and use something else.

Of course, if there were no other standards that were either irrelevant, obsolete, incomplete, unusable, unused or originally sponsored by A Big Corporation, there might be a point to this.........

BAE aims to keep all-u-can-eat ticket at MoD pie-shop

Eurofighter?

Hmm, taking a fast jet interceptor and hastily bolting on a load of kit to turn it into a Multi-role combat aircraft. What can possibly go wrong?

<Sound of Bob Calvert's "Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters" album playing in background....>

O2 PR calls Reg readers 'techie nerds'

Bright side?

We may not know who they are, but I'll bet that the "techy nerd muppets" at O2 can come up with an educated guess. I reckon those poor beggars are in for a pretty miserable time technology-wise for quite a while.

Also, it's worth remembering that for an example of a truly successful PR flack you need look no further than Josef Goebbels. Be thankful for the crap ones, as a prerequisite for The Rise Of Evil is Really Good PR.

Minister: Waste wood is 'huge potential resource'

Wood.

Does this mean that by using a Zippo lighter, which runs on petrol, rather than matches, which run on burning wood, I'm killing the planet, supporting the terroristically-inclined and contributing to the rebuilding of the Iron Curtain leading to World War three?

Now I'm very worried. Being worried, I'm off to have a cigarette to calm down, which means I'll use my Zippo to light it.

Conclusion: The end of the world is YOUR FAULT for publishing this article which caused me to be worried in the first place.

US student planned to ice Chuck Norris

"Terroristic"

Is the unpleasant adhesive sensation that you get in your underwear when a loud explosion occurs unexpectedly in close proximity....

NASA's Phoenix closes on Red Planet

Terminology.

You probably shouldn't describe its payload as an "arsenal", you'll make amanfromMars nervous.

Microsoft deploys protocol defense for IE

UAC?

UAC is on 88% of consumer sessions?

UAC's a Vista feature, isn't it?

Conclusion: Either their stats are bollocks or the Vista sales figures are....

London teen orders 'cab, innit'

Could have been worse.

If the operator had been a bit smarter at interpreting "Baxi", she could have ended up dropping several hundred quid on a Central Heating boiler.

Information Commissioner: Phorm must be opt-in only

What happens next.

1) Phorm make a large "donation" to NuLab.

2) The Attorney General walks over to the Information Commissioner's office to advise him that his interpretation of the regulations in this case is "unsound" and needs to be "reevaluated".

3) The ICO issues a statement apologising for their terrible cockup, telling the world that Phorm are, in fact, indistinguishable from loveable fluffy kittens and that their service is so valuable that they should consider denying an opt-out to ensure that everyone gets the benefit.

4) Phorm's share price doubles overnight.

BT: 'We did not let anyone down over Phorm... it was not illegal'

@Jonathan

Just put "Without Prejudice" prominently at the top of your communication.

Then you can call him an incompentant thieving greaseball overseeing a bunch of clueless twats in cahoots with a bunch of ad-peddling, scumware pushing rats without fear.

UK.gov demands 999 ads on social networking sites

@Anon Cow with the cheese pricing query.

Well, knowing that the person on the other end was Scots (the accent) one could use the old stereotype of the Scots to postulate that said person also moans about the price of cheese.

Does that answer your question?

Dead wife contacts Lancs man via SMS

@Sarah Bee

Spook Messaging Service. You get 200 free a month on that tariff.....

The white sheet with the eyeholes thanks.

Welsh couple cop Mosquito flak

@JonB

Yup, I thought that.

What's the use of a DNA database, ID cards, CCTV cameras et. al. when all a criminal has to do to completely foil a police investigation is to hide in that brief period while the rozzers are spending the bare minimal amount of effort actually looking for him?

Just think how different the Afghan campaign would have been had it been run by the police rather than the army: "We've identified that Mr Bin Laden is in the Tora Bora caves. Unfortunately he's hiding in there, so we're powerless to do anything about it."

Looks like "not fit for purpose" affects all the tentacles of the Home Office, not just the Whitehall bit.

Is Google Gears safe?

@Ian Ferguson

You have the problem in a nutshell.

User sees that www.dodgymalware.ru wants to use Google Gears. User goes: "Ooo, Google, of course I trust them, they're lovely non-evil people." and a botnet enlarges itself.

Given the number of existing ways of doing stuff on a user's PC via a browser, why Google think we need a new one (with all the commensurate scope for lurking holes) rather than just using one of the existing, battle-hardened veterens is beyond me. I, for one, will be clicking the "shove it up your arse" button when I get this dialogue.

Blu-ray Xbox 360 to be sold at a loss?

Well, duh!

Why don't they just sell it as an addon, you know, like they did with the HD-DVD drive?

That way, those who don't want a bloody HD drive on their console and don't want to pay for one can continue to not do so. There's a reason for those sales stats, it's called price.

In fact, I suspect that this is what will happen. There will be an addon for the existing range and a new, "Bloo-Ray inside" version at the top end.....

Steel Cloud servers to power US Navy robo-cannon kit

IFF?

Presumably anyone firing a high-velocity round at you is either unfriendly or you need to get better friends.

We should buy this. The Yanks might start taking target identification a bit more seriously once making one of their famous "friendly fire" mistakes means that they're likely to get automatically hosed with robotic gunfire by return......

EMC buys Brit Microsoft shop

Never mind the grammar, the maths?

If they're paying 42 million quid and the '07 revenue was 38 million quid, how exactly is the one "a little more than two times" the other? I've heard of creative accounting, but even Andersens might think that there was something not quite right about that one..

Is someone comparing apples with pears (or, specifically, dollars with pounds) here?

Sprint and Samsung unveil Jesus Phone lookalike

Steve Jobs.

Don't be so hard on bws, looking at the "official" picture, you'd never believe it was supposed to be the same person:

http://www.apple.com/pr/photos/execs/jobsphotos.html

Loverly syrup innit?

Jimmy Wales resigns from Wikipedia

12:02 in the afternoon.

Er, it sez GMT, so whoever called 62 minutes has the win here.

But aside from that folks, read the byline. It's from Cade in SF, GMT -8 it says here, cut the poor beggar some slack. Nobody gets up at sparrow chirp just to avoid being taken to task by pedants.

Besides, it's funny and worth stretching a point for........

Blighty's Museum of Computing forced to go mobile

Obvious answer.

Ask Bill. He's seriously loaded, runs a philanthropic trust looking for worthy causes to endow and has a more than passing interest in the history of computing.

Gotta be worth a short begging letter at least. Offer to lay on a VIP opening event for the new venue with Bill himself as guest of honour to focus his attention (just neglect to mention that it'll be in Swindon).

(Should have a "Bill" icon but, until they get an answer, I can't say which one.)

Adware slips between pages of e-book

You couldn't make this up.

The Iliad has a Trojan Horse in it?

If there were ever a definition of poetic justice, this has to be it.

Snort coke, shaft the environment, say boffins

Yes, but.....

....can you make biofuel out of it?

Only Ubuntu left standing, as Flash vuln fells Vista in Pwn2Own hacking contest

@Andy Worth

Yup, Adobe own Flash. You see, there was this vulnerability that allowed them to completely take over..............

Botanist sues to stop CERN hurling Earth into parallel universe

@Steve

I don't know about balls, but there's certainly some serious bollocks in there.

Blu-ray 0, SDHC card 1, THX Chief Scientist predicts

Perfectly feasible real soon now.

128Gb cards. Not needed. Your HD film, even loaded with additional cruft, is rattling around like a pea in a submarine on a BD. 16 and 32Gb should be enough to start with, just drop the "extras".

Download speeds are a non-issue. Just sell a read only card in a little box. Something about the size and shape of a DS cartridge box springs to mind. If people want to chew bandwidth and time downloading HD films, let 'em, just cater to the pick-it-up-in-Woolworths mass market as well.

As for playback devices, there are plenty of things out there now to do this. It just requires the tits that make the content to see sense and not try to reinvent the wheel by coming up with yet another bloody format.

All could be done this year, never mind in two year's time. It'd be worth it to see the faces of the Sony execs as they begin to understand the term "Pyhrric victory".......

Wombat rape ordeal turns NZ man Australian

@bob-blah

"....big aussie fag...."

Isn't that in contravention of Rule 1 (and 3, and 5, and 7)?

Denmark signs up for wind powered electric car switch

Dong energy.

Are all the Viz readers on holiday? We have an article mentioning Dong energy and vehicles in the same breath, but nobody's alluded to "Mickey's monkey-spunk moped" yet.

Could you top up the tank with Leopard's fanny batter please? I have a fair way to go......

T5 opening turns into Airplane 3.0

@b166er

That swan analogy. Never seen it used before and I think I just wet myself.

Thank you for making my week.

DIY satellite TV installer shoots wife dead

Plumbing?

A good thing he wasn't fitting an outside tap. He'd probably have used a Barret Light .50 and killed someone four blocks away.

Boeing faces jumbo problem over US aerial raygun fleet

@Peter

Oopsie, my bad. Should've checked.

<tappity>

Holy smoke! The 380's bigger than a Galaxy. Who'd've thunk it?

<tappity tap>

The only thing out there available* bigger right now seems to be the Antonov AN-225 Mriya, which edges the 380 on length (84m) and wingspan (88.4m), although it's only a paltry 18.1m tall. Carries a massive 250 tonnes in payload though.

Hmmm, we can get *two* lasers in one of those and there's enough capacity left for turrets. I call dibs on the top one.

*Antonov have one. They reckon they can build more, but nobody's ordered any.

RE: payload.

If they're just squeezing the thing into a 747-400, they're going to need a really big mallet to get it into a 777.

Oh, and "great looks"? I'm sorry, but the 777 is straight out of the long-tube-with-wings school of aeronautical design. The words "very ordinary looking conventional airliner" spring to mind.

Also, payloads from the manufacturers:

747-400 - 110 tonnes

747-8 - 134 tonnes

777 - 103.9 tonnes (oops)

A380-F - 150 tonnes

Cargo density isn't an issue here as we only want to put one thing (a frickin' huge laser) into the beast. Nose load isn't a requirement (we want to put a frickin' huge laser emitter there, not a door). Runway / taxiway size isn't a problem (if the airfield can accept a B52, a 380's going to look a little lost in the space). Since what we're looking for is interior space for chemical tanks and payload for carrying the maximum possible amount of chemical "fuel" for the laser, this looks like a win for the 380F to me.

Ok, it looks a bit like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, but this is the same military that operates the A10 "Warthog"..........

BAA boots Vulture from T5 frequent flyer club

Schipol.

They have moving walkways? Last time I went through there, I'd have killed for a moving walkway or three. International (PRG) to domestic (MST) transfer. That'll be a mile or so that way through the crowds, shopping concourse, rebuilding works and three(!!) security points. You've got 20 minutes....(and the f**ker* was late when I got there, so I'd got all hot 'n sweaty for no reason).

Heathrow, shite though it be, has an advantage in that it's distributed nature means a bus from Terminal to Terminal rather than being forced to walk from T4 to T1.

*Actually it was an ATR, but it looked a *bit* like a fokker.......

Apple forbids Windows users from installing Safari for Windows

@ratfox

That has to be the dumbest argument I've ever heard.

Just 'cos one contract says something stupid, it doesn't automatically invalidate every other one in the world. EULA is an acronym - "End User License Agreement", nowhere does this imply that any one EULA is in any way connected with any other. The validity, or not, of one such, in no way impacts the validity of any other such. The only mystery here is why on earth you would even begin to think so?

Put it this way. If some jerk also using the handle "ratfox" ended up being convicted as a kiddie-fiddler, would you expect to go to jail by association?

Kent bloke buried under 3,000 congestion charge receipts

They've identified the fault?

So have I.

"Our service provider, Capita......"

There's yer problem, right there. They ain't know as "Crapita" for nothing. The only mystery here is why Government departments at all levels persist in hiring them, despite repeated proof that they couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery.

Canadians go out clubbing

Time for drinkies?

I'll have a lager and a large Canadian Club for the seal please.

Yes, I know, but it's waterproof and warm.

Laptop vendors burned in battery plant blaze

@Ashley

They probably do have alternative sources of supply and I'll bet that other manufacturers will quickly ramp up production to fill demand. That won't stop them all using this as an excuse to jack up prices though.

This is exactly what happened many years ago when a Taiwanese DRAM plant went on fire. You could still get the stuff with no trouble, but 1 and 4 meg SIMMS (as made by world + dog at the time) became eye-wateringly expensive overnight due to the "shortage". I'm sure that, back then, nobody involved even considered for a moment that the opportunity to flog off a load of low-margin parts at a healthy markup might make it worth talking up the impact a bit.

You'd almost think that margins were down on laptops and that HP, Dell and Asus had clubbed together and burned the place down themselves.

Microsoft tries to talk its way into VoIP

Be careful what you say....

........."WANKER!"

<beep> <click>

<nasal female american voice> "Please hold, this call is being diverted to Gordon Brown's extension."

No, no need to get my coat, it recognises my voice when I call it and puts itself on.

Wikipedia scores $3m donation

Misquote?

Surely that should read: "......<cough> withoutcommercialorotherbias <cough>.....".

It is a great resource, true. But an unqualified statement that it's without bias is, as we all know, a barefaced lie. The amount of bias is slight (given the vast amount of content on show) and limited to specific areas where certain people have a vested interest, but it's there.

The Guardian ditches Phorm

This could just be a smokescreen.

I mean, if something was pushing irrelevant misinphormation into the Grauniad's web feed, how would you tell?

Religious MPs get free vote on hybrid embryos

@Tony Blair for Pope.

Nice one! How long do you give him before the boss loses His patience and converts the grinning vicar into a pair of smoking shoes in a scorched patch?

Soot almost as bad as CO₂ for global warming

Exhaling tax?

Sorry, I just had a vision of the entire population of Scotland inflating to enormous sizes and then exploding.

The tatty, well-patched coat that has a few years life in it yet.

China unbans the Beeb

Re: Tricky..

No trouble. Just get the department responsible to edit a few old newspapers to show that such a ban *was* imposed by some now-discredited hardliner, showing the lifting of said ban to be an act of munificence by the new, more cuddly types in power these days. Any news organisation that dares to suggest that the evidence is fabricated gets, er, banned.

Credit to George Orwell for that little trick.

Off now to post the words "Tibet", "state-sponsored murder" and "dictatorship" in as many places as possible on the BBC's fora (Latin pedants, fill yer boots).

My apologies to any Chinese who used to enjoy reading El Reg before I said that.

Awed fraudsters defeated by UK's passport interviews

Hmm.

Why did I read that as: "Hitler said that IPS was then...."?

There is of course no resemblance at all between the NuLab Home Office and the Nazis. What was I thinking?