* Posts by Mister Cheese

142 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Dec 2007

Microsoft retires Windows 3.11 on 18th birthday

Mister Cheese
Paris Hilton

Inflight entertainment

When my terminal crashed on a Virgin flight a few years ago, I was treated to a little penguin logo during the reboot - not Win3.11...

Hitachi UT32MH70 32in LCD TV

Mister Cheese
Happy

@ @ @ AC

Now there was me thinking that interlaced had the same number of lines as progressive, just half the refresh-rate - first cycle draws in the odd-numbered rows, next one the even-numbered rows. Unless I'm missing something...

Oh, and my lappy screen's only about 6mm. True, it has a box connected to it containing the rest of the useful components, but I'll ignore that for the purpose of statistics...

Top aero boffin: Green planes will be noisy planes

Mister Cheese
Happy

@AC (overwing engines)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P6M_SeaMaster - I guess it's been done before...

Course, the noise for the human cargo might be a little excessive - but what's to stop designers moving the passengers below the wings with the luggage hold on top? Or even sticking the wings on the top... maybe just too unconventional for the people with the money to risk.

UK confirms e-voting death

Mister Cheese
Black Helicopters

Cost-based decision?

Maybe they've discovered that it's cheaper to count the votes by hand than it is to commission another government IT project...

BMW unwraps electric Mini

Mister Cheese
Flame

Can someone explain the maths please?

Nice concept - maybe if they turn the power down a little it could go a bit further on a full erm tank of sparks.

Can someone with a little more insight please explain how by adding 28kWh of electricity I can end up with 35kWh in the tank? Maybe it's worth investing in that mini-windmill after all.

Flames, cos of the quarter-tonne of Li-ion battery...

Brussels bounces BT-Phorm quiz back to UK.gov

Mister Cheese
Coat

@Graham Wood

Organised? This is BT you're talking about here...

Segway shock army to invade Department of Transport

Mister Cheese
Coat

Playmobil

Will also accept Lego if there's no PM-Segway yet...

Maybe Segway's could be permitted to use the railway-lines too? FFS, it's an unregistered, untaxed, motorized vehicle... oops, I've said the 'T' word, now maybe they'll be legalized - for a fee to HMRC...

DARPA develops zap-bomb electropulse countermeasures

Mister Cheese
Black Helicopters

Cheaper solution

A spare radio in a tin box in case the first one gets fried. Can I have my $500M development budget now please?

Acorn alumni to toast tech pioneer's 30th anniversary

Mister Cheese
Gates Horns

@OrsonX

Oh dear. Should I correct:

10 PRINT "hello";

20 GOTO 10

>RUN

hellohellohellohellohello.....

And for the rest, here's the various graphics modes in full:

20k RAM:

Mode 0: 2 colour 640x256 (80x32 chars)

Mode 1: 4 colour 320x256 (40x32 chars)

Mode 2: 16 colour (inc 8 flashing) 160x256 (20x32 chars)

16K RAM:

Mode 3: 2 colour text only 80x25 chars

10K RAM:

Mode 4: 2 colour 320x256 (40x32 chars)

Mode 5: 4 colour 320x256 (20x32 chars)

8K RAM:

Mode 6: 2 colour text only 40x25 chars

1K RAM:

Mode 7: teletext

I didn't get where I am today without knowing how many colours you could use in Mode 1...

Hackintosh maker bites back at Apple

Mister Cheese
Pirate

Oil

"Ford can't make you buy oil and tires from the dealer"

Not sure about Ford, but Audi strongly enforce a specific type of long-life oil which appears only to be sold in their garages...

I guess Apple are proud of their OS, and want to use it to sell the hardware - and don't want to be undermined by someone selling other similar hardware giving a similar system to what Apple are trying to sell. The fact that this guy is selling boxes with OS-X pre-installed means that he's a direct competitor to Apple, whilst being in violation of their very clear software licensing terms.

AT&T freshens tourist-trapping iPhone data plans

Mister Cheese
Linux

Unbelievable!

I'm impressed. I thought hotel broadband charges were expensive - but for only 100MB (that's maybe only 20 large e-mails) they'll charge you $120!

EC misleading EU on copyright extension, says boffin

Mister Cheese
Flame

I wish...

...I could be paid for work I completed 10 years ago. I have to keep on working, unlike some slackers (Mr Cliff Richard, I'm talking to you, but I suspect you probably don't hang out here) who do a bit of work 50 years ago and then moan when there's a threat of their income from it drying up.

Acer Aspire 8920G 18.4in laptop

Mister Cheese
Coat

Ocular colour-depth

Dunno about you, but I think I can only recognise the difference between a few shades of colour. Maybe that's why I get the other half to choose the paint... but seriously, to the human or martian eye, what's the difference between 63 shades of green and 255?

eBay changes anger smaller sellers

Mister Cheese
Thumb Down

Post Office?

Suggestion for the Post Office... why not set up a rival to e-bay with minimal fees and transfer payment to the seller automatically on delivery? They already have a network of pick-up/drop-off points, and seem to need more business...

Royal Navy plans world's first running-jump jet

Mister Cheese
Boffin

Boring bit

(boffinry goggles activated)

Travelator: no, cos planes don't have powered wheels. It's the air-speed you need to brake, not the ground-speed.

Soft water: also no, actually pretty hard if you fall in from a height. That's why people can die/get crippled whilst jumping/diving badly into water from just a few metres up.

How about smearing the runway with very sticky jam?

TBH - the point about this only being required if a lot of aircraft return all at once fully-laden is important. That won't happen in a war situation, and can be planned against when there's less stress.

NASA's Ares V may crush Kennedy crawlerway

Mister Cheese
Paris Hilton

SI units

7,700,000kg = 1.83MJb (megaJubs) if I'm not mistaken...

IBM wraps fat tentacles around fluffy clouds

Mister Cheese
Joke

@AC (How much...)

"How much data centre will $300/13 buy you? $23 million each, how far will that go for a carbon neutral, state of the art, bomb proof building and ancillary services?"

From that list, I'd suggest just the 'art' for the 13 reception areas.

Microsoft dashes hopes for 'major' Windows server upgrade

Mister Cheese
Pirate

Oooh, oooh, I've got a better name.

Windows Server 2009? No way will it be released in 2008... and I'll eat a chocolate hat if it does.

The robot at the border: UK bets big on face scanning

Mister Cheese
Black Helicopters

Prosthetics

Wonder if you could fool these boxes with a rubber mask that matches the face profile on the "biometric" passport?

Comment about cost is a good one though - I'd estimate (using one ISO-standard wet finger) that each of these would cost £183k/year to run, including two annual software upgrades. Does it use Windows?

Red rag, meet bull: The software resilience gamble

Mister Cheese
Happy

@R J Tysoe

Or "commenters" for that mater...

Microsoft's Vista push probed by Fair Trade Commission

Mister Cheese
Linux

McDonalds

"Chicken McSandwich please, but no mayo". Sorted. Believe it or not, they are assembled fresh. Course, the discount for not having mayo is the same as the discount for not having Windows on a Dell.

Sats blunder firm sacked

Mister Cheese
Pirate

Failure?

"The QCA has paid ETS £39.6M to date. Under the cancellation deal, ETS will pay back £24.1M."

Assuming they were paid in advance for the contract, I work that out at about £8M/year. They do one year's "work" and get to keep 2-years worth of the money...

Mind you, compared to some govt contracts this one seems a little on the tiny side...

Twitter falls silent in the UK

Mister Cheese
Linux

Random guesses

1. I'd suggest that 250 relates to the number of messages per day, not per year.

2. The hosting service in Yankee land probably rejects SMSs to an international destination, requiring the application to send using a provider local to the recipient instead.

Penguin, to remind me of the summer weather we're not having.

US says the next war will be all in our minds

Mister Cheese
Boffin

The corps

is mother, the corps is father.

Prof says fatties a bigger menace than bin Laden

Mister Cheese
Coat

WMDs?

My imagination wanders onto a special-forces team surrounding the lard section in my local Tescburys...

The IT Crowd goes west

Mister Cheese
Heart

Dear sir stroke madam,

"I am writing to inform you of a fire which has broken out on the premises of..." no, that's too formal.

Jeez, if you don't find it funny, don't watch it. I don't watch Big Brother, but don't bang on about how much a waste of airtime it is.

Nobody mentioned a dangerous Transformers t-shirt yet?

The BPM Buzzword Bonanza

Mister Cheese
Paris Hilton

Tempo

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=define%3Abpm

Nuff said. Wish marketing creatures could do a search like this before they release an identical abbreviation onto the unsuspecting public.

Sorry Reg, started the survey, got bored. Can we have shorter questions and answers next time, with potentially some sarcastic ones thrown in for good measure?

Paris, cos she'd know about rhythm.

NASA spies liquid in Titanic lake

Mister Cheese
Joke

WMDs discovered on Titan

Bush set to issue a final ultimatum before invasion. Nothing to do with the potential fuel goldmine. No. WMDs. Honest.

'Hacktivism' threatens world of nations

Mister Cheese

International gateway

Blocking traffic at the borders won't help either. The source of the attack (ie the spamware or whatever) could come from outside, could easily be disguised as normal HTTP traffic - dodgy flash movie, image, PDF, MS-Word macro, whatever - and then sit dormant on badly-patched machines within the country to be attacked, maybe for weeks or months. Then at zero-hour, the attack comes from inside.

If any development work needs to be done to block this type of attack, maybe it should be on outgoing traffic in domestic DSL router/firewalls.

UK BOFHs face psychometric dissection

Mister Cheese
Flame

Re: Good Idea

"Most of the admins I've ever dealt with were kind of "difficult". They need to learn to think like the users do and speak the language the users speak, as anyone should do for their customers"

Error: "Re-double the prioritization of the blue sky with synergy" does not compile.

Maybe that's why we have a helldesk - to (mis)translate the request and response between the two sides, and to keep admins away from (l)users. Or maybe they're just there to annoy everyone involved...

Blank robbers swipe 3,000 'fraud-proof' UK passports

Mister Cheese
Stop

Why not...

...just publish the serial-numbers of the nicked passports? Or is that too obvious?

Home Office to order fingerprinting of air passengers

Mister Cheese
Pirate

Here's a novel suggestion

Why don't they check that the name on the passport/permitted photo-id actually matches the name on the boarding-pass? Absolutely zero need to throw money at a non-problem. Or ankle-tag (or wrist-tag) everyone that comes into the airport, and remove it at the gate. Or write the flight-number on their forehead in UV-readable ink at check-in.

I think it all comes down to the fact that we're probably the only country on the planet that doesn't check passports on exit.

Celebrity publicist develops mathematical 'fame formula'

Mister Cheese
Unhappy

@Antonio

Not quite... I'll explain (although I shouldn't need to here):

f(t)=b+p((1/10t)+(1/2t^2))

Let t=0

f(0)=b+p((1/0+1/0))

f(0)=b+assert failed

core dumped

Greenpeace: UK gov trying to strangle wind power

Mister Cheese
Go

Wind power storage

How about this for an idea... why not have something on all windfarm sites to store the energy they generate if they can't sell it to the grid at that time - they can then release it back when they can sell it?

Something simple, like a big weight on a bit of rope that gets electrically wound up the inside of the hollow turbine mast, and let down again to generate? Like pumped-storage, only with something a little more dense so you don't need as much of it?

Morgan shows 'light & slippery' fuel-cell car concept

Mister Cheese
Flame

Water shortage?

We best start melting the ice-caps sharpish then to unlock all that energy, before the sea runs dry.

I like the way the septics manage to take a green fuel (excluding solar-cell manufacture, maintenance and delivery) and convert into another abuser of natural gas... very impressive. Specially since you need additional energy to boil the water first, before you can react it with the methane...!

HP shatters excessive packaging world record

Mister Cheese
Stop

Standard HP sized boxes

Dealt with a lot of HP deliveries in my time. Everything small enough comes in the same size box - license certificates in one box, a coax terminator in another box, a scsi terminator in one... three boxes where one could have sufficed but I assume their warehouse can't cope. It's been going on for many years...

Tech woes threaten NASA's Moon plan

Mister Cheese
Alien

Two points...

Back in '69, the health+safety crowd were still in nappies, and people were willing to take a lot of risks. That sort of behaviour is not permitted these days - there has to be a near-guarantee of getting the astronauts out there and safely back. It wouldn't surprise me if there had been a few unpublished moon-attempts from NASA and CCCP ending very badly that we won't hear anything about for a number of years, if ever.

The other point is about the lack of water for the mission. If they can't fit it in their truck, why not send it on ahead in an unmanned box near the planned site, and then pick it up when they land (and defrost it)?

IBM one-ups Sun with terabyte tape drive

Mister Cheese
Flame

@Spam

"Tapes are by far the best way to large scale backups. They are small, light, fast, and reliable."

They're not *that* small and light - unless you still use 30m DDS tapes...

Boeing to build combo airship-copter flying cranes

Mister Cheese
Pirate

skyhooks?

Weren't these invented by Roald Dahl, and used to transport Charlie's great glass lift^H^H^H^Helevator?

Obama bloats Vista by 11MB

Mister Cheese
Boffin

To reboot or not to reboot?

Depends on whether the files to be updated happen to be in use by the system or user at the time of the install or not. If they are in use, then the actual install will be delayed until the next time the machine is booted up. If they're not in use, they can be installed straight away for your more-instantaneous enjoyment.

Anyway, it'll only take 30 seconds to reboot. Oh, hang on - that's my Win3.11 system...

Hawkeye technology turns tennis into a cartoon

Mister Cheese
Paris Hilton

Come on, Tim!

Nuff said. Apart from the fact that dry mud can produce a bit of a chalk-like puff when you hit it with a tennis-ball at 200km/h.

Prius hybrid to get rooftop solar panel

Mister Cheese
Happy

Yes, I drive a Prius

And I can average about 52mpg from it. It doesn't have a sunroof though, so the £20 one from Maplin would need to sit on the dashboard.

Note also that it has two batteries. One conventional one for the petrol engine, and one 200V NiMH one for powering the motor (which is charged during deceleration instead of just wasting energy in heating the brakes).

The air-con's a bit pants though, can take ten minutes to cool the cockpit on a sunny day - so something that could keep the fan running when it's parked, with or without air-con, could be a benefit.

Oh, and road-tax is £15/year. What is it in your 144mph diesel BMW? Don't forget that diesel has a lot more carbon in it per litre than petrol...

Transatlantic data sharing talks stumble over access to justice

Mister Cheese
Paris Hilton

EU

We *do* vote for an EU parliament which is there to spend as much of the 25 nations money as it can do, without the need to pass a financial audit.

The EU commission is there to think up ideas. Technically they are appointed by the democratically-elected national governments. Of course, anything they decide needs to be ratified by all the EU nations. Which, given the state of the constit^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htreaty might be never...

Paris, cos that's in the EU.

Tiwi spies on your children, so you don't have to

Mister Cheese
Coat

Irony?

Isn't that just like goldy and bronzy, only made out of iron?

Japanese military shamed by USB device

Mister Cheese
Coat

@Adrian Jackson

Shurley you mean 'Mis-spelling' ?

Observers criticise London e-count

Mister Cheese
Flame

Why not?

"Short of recounting the ballots by hand there is no way of knowing if this had a significant effect on the election,"

So why not give it a shot? This electronic counting was a trial - and surely it would need to be verified? It doesn't have to be on the same frantic scale as an election count where the result needs to be announced quickly - it could take weeks if necessary.

Or are these paid election observers just a bunch of slackers who can't see an easy way to check, so they won't bother?

CERN declares Large Hadron Collider perfectly safe

Mister Cheese
Alert

Really safe?

Well, I guess if they accidentally create a black-hole and suck the entire planet into it, nobody will be left to sue them on their minor inaccuracy.

Oh, and as for no vacuum bubbles in the visible universe - surely if they're a vacuum then they're invisible... so I might have some floating in my cup of erm tea for all I know.

Davis faces North Korean victory margin in civil liberty vote

Mister Cheese
IT Angle

Safe Tory seat by any chance?

The reason Labour (and probably the rest of the parties too) aren't bothering to field a candidate is because, like a lot of places, the local electorate would vote in a cabbage if it was wearing a blue rosette...

Asus Eee PC 901 to hit Blighty on 1 July

Mister Cheese
Coat

@Richard, H3N0451

Technically it's ASUSes for a plural, ASUS' would be a possessional.

Any more pedants out there wishing to be correctise of my grammaring?

DARPA pilot-ware unflappable in wing-fling damage test

Mister Cheese
Black Helicopters

LOL

"...airplane's new vehicle configuration..." - gotta love the terminology. Fleshy version: "Mayday, mayday, my wing has been... erm... updated by a ground-launched airborne-vehicle reconfiguration device."

Shouldn't this article be in RotM [tm]?

As if I need to explain the black helicopter...