Posts by TeeCee

Segway bought by former patent spat adversary Ninebot

Re: The segway always was a solution looking for a problem

Maybe the Segway has fans 'cos it's permissible to ride one without dressing as a day-glo shrinkwrapped sack of King Edwards and covering oneself in flashing lights.

European Parliament mulls law on use of blood metal in tech

Guess which version the Greens are pushing for?

As the second would seem destined to make illegal anything more highly advanced technologically than the horse and cart, that one?

Always look for the ulterior motive......

EU says dominant Google illegally alters search results

"Convince us you ain't"

Ah yes. Guilty until proven innocent.

Hard enough when proving innocence doesn't involve proving a negative.....

Yelp, which does have a good product...

Funny how business strategies like; "Nice restaurant you have there. Be a crying shame if it got a load of bad reviews and went bust now, wouldn't it.........?" always seem to do well in earning a crust.

Is hyper-convergence a good thing? Ask a mini computer veteran

Er, what?

"cutting both the OPEX and CAPEX..........., IT budgets comes under less strain."

Is it just me or does that translate as "if you buy cheaper stuff that costs less to run, you save money"?

Incomprehensible boffins bring quantum computers a step closer

Quantum Computing.

I can see the business applications now.

The main problem with conventional computing in addressing the needs of business is that whenever you come up with a correct answer that causes some bugger to change the question.

Hopefully a quantum computer will be able to deliver the right answer and the right answer to the new question at the same time.

Bloke hits armadillo AND mother-in-law with single 9mm round

I prefer APDS rounds. That's Armadillo Prevention Discarding Sabot.

Or, in other words, chuck an old shoe at it and make it fuck off.

Holy crap! Where do you live that has armadillos that big?

Grandmaster FLUSH: Chess champ booted for allegedly cheating with iPod app in the loo

"the chief arbiter made him forfeit his match"

Poetic justice at its best.

His opponent won and he finished as number two.

Twitter yanks firehose from DataSift, other resellers

Re: "build solutions around Twitter data"

The root cause is: "Opinions are like arseholes, everybody's got one.".

The problem is that, in the past, many arseholes found no outlet for their opinions, causing blockage. Previous attempts at solving this problem used some variation on the "Speaker's corner" approach which tended to result in a secondary problem, arseholes being pelted with rotting fruit[1] by those listening to the diatribe of rabid cobblers which was invariably on offer.

Twitter solves that problem by allowing opinionated arseholes to publicise their opinions, without actually obliging anyone either to listen or give a toss if they do.

[1] Or, worse still, being elected to government.

Tech troll's podcasting patent blown out of the water by EFF torpedo

They sued Apple?

Using a bullshit patent?

I'm amazed that works. Surely that's like trying to freeze polar bears to death or kill Satan with a flamethrower....

Xiaomi's birthday present to itself: Flogging 2m phones in 12 hours

Re: Profit not volumes

Chasing market share can be a Good Thing if:

1) You have spare capacity / production sitting idle.

2) The knockdown rates you charge to grab it still contribute to margin (i.e. at least cover direct costs).

Forget those and you go titsup.com rather quickly.

Foreign firms must obey EU laws no matter where they're based, says EU. Hear that, Google?

Sauce for the Goose....

Maybe if the US were to do away with "we pwn teh hole wurld"[1] legislation like API and SOX, we might be prepared to talk about the problem.

[1] 'Cos you get the impression that the authors of such can't do difficult stuff like spelling and tying their own shoelaces.

ICANN urges US, Canada: Help us stop the 'predatory' monster we created ... dot-sucks!

Or, in other words.

ICANN are a bit skint. They're angling for an excuse to ban .sucks before the clock runs down and they have to fork out $2,500 for "icann.sucks".

RELICS of the Earth's long lost TWIN planet FOUND ON MOON

Re: Aaaaaand...

Probably not a nutter, just an American.

Paranoia over some "evil government conspiracy" or other seems to come with the passport.

Google wants Marvin the Paranoid Android's personality in the cloud

Around these parts....

.....it's been previously observed that Google are becoming alarmingly similar to the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

This probably proves that this is actually because they are the local office of same.

Do androids dream of herding electric sheep?

Automated mouse catcher.

It's called a "mousetrap" and has been around for quite some time now.

Ok, it doesn't look like a robotic cat, but then yer sheep-herding drones ain't exactly collie-analogues now, are they?

UK.gov: We want Britannia's mobe-enabled cars to rule the roads

Re: Autonomous?

You are correct but you have missed one thing: investment in autonomous vehicles.

51 billion quid means there is a vast tonnage of gravy on that train and the comms lads want a slice of it too.

Big Blue securo-bods warn of dire Dyre Wolf AMONG WOLVES

Of course if it actually were an extinct wolf rather than a variant of the Dyre[1] malware they were talking about, you'd have a point.

But it isn't. So you don't. You muppet.

[1] Clearly spelled as such throughout the article and the referenced one, so heck knows where you got "Dyer" from.

Nuclear waste spill: How a pro-organic push sparked $240m blunder

Re: Fast Integral Reactor. @otto

There's three words for that: Guardian of Piri.

Every Space 1999 aficionado knows this one.

Re: Why not organic kitty litter?

Presumably somewhere there's an enormous mountain made of billions of tons of lard, caused by the trend for low-fat food products....

Hmmm. I wonder if you can ski on lard.

Streak life: Oz woman flashes boobs at Google Street View car

Hmm.

Distracting somebody who's supposed to be concentrating on controlling a couple of tonnes of speeding metal in an urban environment is actually a really bloody stupid thing to do and could easily result in some poor bastard becoming inconveniently dead.

Regardless of how the cops delivered the lesson, it needed delivering.

Re: Naked he-boobies legal. Naked she-boobies not. Explain.

Buckets and yard rope required there.

Stress me, test me, vex me ... boffins seek Hall Effect in frustrated magnets

ABS?

Actually I think you'll find that the first common automotive application of the Hall effect was in distributors, using magnetic triggering to produce exact spark timing at all revolutions[1].

Even called a "Hall effect distributor" to give the game away.

[1] If you work out how many zaps per second there are in a four-pot engine at 3000rpm, you start to understand why an undamped bent spring and cam operating contacts doesn't really cut it in this department.

Re: I don't know about quantum stuff, but I do know about frustration

Well there's an election coming up and campaigning is well under way. That should mean we're currently surrounded by a stupidity field well into the hundreds of megaduhs.

Sounds like the perfect opportunity to indulge in some serious science with high-energy frustrinos.

Mozilla piles on China's SSL cert overlord: We don't trust you either

It's not trusting government that's the problem, it's that governments don't trust each other and insist on having complete ownership of "their" certificates. Hence the proliferation.

Same reason we have three GPS systems when one will do the job perfectly well.

EU Commission looking for ways to DECLARE WAR on Google

Re: Can they also look into dominance of governments ?.

I've never seen the beggars nearly steal mine, they always succeed.

SPY FRY: Smart meters EXPLODE in Californian power surge

Re: disinformation

Much of Central Europe[1] uses two phase for heating systems. So your house has a two-phase (of the available three) supply, but only one is used for most purposes.

[1] Presumably a Soviet standard.

Google cracks down on browser ad injectors after shocking study

Re: Unwanted ad injectors aren't part of a healthy ads ecosystem

every 15 minutes through a football game it stops to advertise

1) They are not allowed to do this and they don't. All the action is shown live as it happens. You'd know this if you'd ever watched sport on SKY rather than just making shit up.

2) ITV did do this once accidently (some eejit thumped the play button while cueing up the ads for half-time). They got arseraped by OFCOM for their pains.

Half-time ads are no big deal. That's when you go and make the tea anyway.

Met Police in egg/face blunder as shop-a-crim site's SSL cert expires

Re: Cobblers

Yup, the only reason you even notice is that certain browsers kick up a stink about. As for risk of compromise increases over time, I'd have thought that the efforts of miscreants would be more likely focussed on shiny, new certs where there's more milage in the exploit.

Not too long ago this particular error would be ignored for the irrelevance it is. While the fuss made now is in theory correct, in practice it comes up so often it merely encourages reflex clicking through SSL errors. A Very Bad Thing Indeed.

This one weird trick deletes any YouTube flick in just a few clicks

"utter havoc"?

Bit OTT with the hyperbole there methinks.

"Withdrawal symptoms amongst ADD-afflicted YouBoob addicts" is probably closer to the truth.

It's the FALKLANDS SYNDROME! Fukushima MELTDOWN to cause '10,000 Chernobyls' in South Atlantic

Re: Surely the wreck of the Belgrano will stop it?

What would put the kibosh on that one is the obligatory "Wreck of Belgrano FOUND ON MOON!!11!!" story that must be running somewhere today.

UK's National Museum of Computing celebrates 10 glorious years

Ah yes, ARM.

That'll be thing the thing that utterly dominates the mobile world, yes? And of course, most of the pundits reckon mobile devices will kill off everything else[1]. Most countries would cut off their left nut for a slice of that.

[1] It doesn't matter who says this or how often, it's still bollocks.

Just WALK IN and buy an Apple Watch. Are you mad?

Re: You want difficult?

A watch collector and specialist I know has a Rolex that keeps good time. It's a fake he bought as such in Italy and has an Eterna movement in it, or: "A far better movement than bloody Rolex ever fitted" as he put it.

Snakes on a backplane: Server-room cabling horrors

Re: If you think that is bad....

There is one thing worse than a rat's nest of Twinax to tidy up.

A rat's nest of Twinax that's had two boxes of laser printer toner emptied over it.....

Re: 'The more computers you have, the more cables you need'

And IBM Type 1 was real man's cable, unlike this weedy UTP stuff.

EU digi-chief clashes with robo-veep over geo-blocking

Re: Probably a question for Mr Orlowski

Why indeed.

Note that one of the few European companies actually turning out content that's natively in English (i.e. going head-to-head with the American suppliers) is the BBC. Which does quite nicely out of US sales.

You have to suspect that the usual French paranoia over "Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism" is at the root of this somewhere.

Re: Irrelevant and unhelpful?

Yes it is.

Unless of course your supply of well-stuffed brown envelopes comes from the TV companies, in which case it isn't.

Day FOUR of the GitHub web assault: Activists point fingers at 'China's global censorship'

And what's definately between Baidu and everywhere else that could easily do this to all passing traffic?

The Great Firewall of China.

There goes the last of the doubt as to who's doing this. If they weren't such a PITA you'd have to laugh at the Chinese government for being repeatedly so shit at misdirection.

Don't listen to me, I don't know what I'm talking about – a pundit speaks

Ah yes.

Well I worked out quite some time ago that the industry analysts' crystal balls are no more accurate than mine is.

NASA: We're gonna rip up an ASTEROID and make it ORBIT the MOON

Simpler.

Ditch the landing engines, rotating mounts 'n such and just drive the thing into it front end first. There's sweet Fanny Adams by way of gravity involved when approaching an object that size, so the attitude control thrusters should be able to ensure that no more than a gentle bump is felt.

Re: Nah! What we really need is...

Yes. The 1999 that actually turned up was rather disappointing for that reason.

Helium-filled drive tech floats to top of HGST heap

you cloud also mention

You work for HP and ICMFP.

Re: "before those persistent helium molecules find a way through"

I'm guessing that the reason there is not what happens to the balloon itself, but because driving to where you want to launch the thing with a tank of pressurised Hydrogen in your vehicle has a whole can of worms around permits, vehicle labelling, where you can and cannot go and such associated with it.

Chrome trumps all comers in reported vulnerabilities

Re: half truth statistics coming from Secunia.

Define "unpatched".

What's the maximum allowable time between reporting and a patch being issued before you hang the "unpatched" label on it? You have to allow some, unless the developers have a time machine[1].

You probably need to vary that by fix complexity to keep everyone on their toes, so that needs a definition as well.

[1] Not the "unfair advantage to Apple" sort, the other one.

EXPOSED: Google, Obama caught doing it once a week

Re: Stupid Question

Oh, I dunno. They only wanted to make a shitload of cash.

I'll take corporate greed over megalomania any day when it comes to who pulls the levers of power.

As for not starting a war, when your endgame's world domination rather than profit you have to be a tad more subtle than that to win.

Ford: Our latest car gizmo will CHOKE OFF your FUEL if you're speeding

Meh!

Makes no odds what gadgets they pile onto the PoS, whether I want them or not. I'll not consider a ruddy Ford until they change their seats for something suitable for those of us who aren't raving masochists.

Marathon race ace FOUND ON MARS – NASA boffins overjoyed

eleven years and a little over two weeks to make the distance

Now that may not sound very fast for a marathon, but you have to remember that on Mars that's a New World Record!!11!!

IS 'hackers' urge US-based jihadis: 'Wipe yourselves out trying to kill 0.00005 of US forces'

Re: Hmmm....

Nope. The angle I was looking for was:

Pyrrhic victory = cacking yourself over in winning.

Pyrrhic Defeat = cacking yourself over and still losing....

i.e. The sort of strategy where all the opposition needs to do to ensure victory is buy popcorn and enjoy the show.

EU creative collection agencies want YouTube et al to pay their wages

no pan-Europe licensing or the Americans will take over

U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A!

'Cos somebody needs to open that can of worms and tip out the contents and if this bunch of pillocks won't......

Proof, as if it were required, that the EU regards the original Treaty of Rome as something of an inconvenience these days: 'Free movement of goods and services' remember?