Posts by Some Beggar

Who are the biggest electric car liars - the BBC, or Tesla Motors?

I dunno.

They seem to have managed perfectly well with refillable gas bottles.

Arcam Solo Neo combo hi-fi

Oh good grief.

"I found that the same tracks sounded considerably better when played back from an iPhone connected to the irDock"

So the Wolfson DAC and common-or-garden crystal used in most iphones/pods/pads sounds better than the Wolfson DAC and low-jitter crystal in this bit of kit? Does that mean these audiophile components are a load of pony or your hearing is shot?

Or perhaps it simply means that you should use actual test kit to review audio equipment rather than a fallible old pair of human ears. Hey! Maybe then you could then give some actual information on performance rather than such trite and meaningless adjectives as "detailed", "transparent" and "clinical".

Fucking "clinical". For the love of fuck.

Arcam Solo rDac wireless digital-to-analogue converter

I have my air shipped in from Tasmania.

You can't trust the mucky British air to properly carry either EM or sound waves. It ruins the fruitiness of the clarinet and entirely detremblizes the lower notes of the piano. If you're still listening to your music through Blighty Air then you may as well throw away your vinyl and buy yourself a stylophone.

Audiophile's New Clothes bunkum of the silliest sort.

For shame.

PARIS concocts commemorative cocktail

The Ben And Gerry or The Nancy

Perhaps if you'd drunk your Guinness from proper glasses you might have been in a state to understand the subtle difference between a cocktail and a children's party dessert.

Infinity Blade

You're forgetting the critical correction factor.

Actual score for weak game: 50%

Corrected for the presence of a lower case 'i' in front of the platform name: 80%

New NASA model: Doubled CO₂ means just 1.64°C warming

Somebody put Lewis back in the sandpit.

"Doubled carbon levels are normally viewed in the current state of enviro play as a scenario that would lead to catastrophe; that is, to warming well beyond 2°C"

The model they used gives warming of 1.94°C reducing to 1.64°C.

And the lead 'boffin' was very careful to state that this research does not undermine the current consensus on climate change:

""This feedback slows but does not alleviate the projected warming," Bounoua said.

I know I shouldn't expect competent reporting of science in a magazine written by server-jockeys but really ... this is just a failure of basic comprehension. Whether that is due to illiteracy or dishonesty on the part of little Lewis is a moot point.

Gov pays Greens to lobby it, says report

Nope.

But then there is nothing in this article or in the report from which it is cribbed that suggests that any such pissing away is happening.

Yes. Perfectly sure.

The Tax Payers Alliance (or rather its charitable arm, the catchily named "politics and economics research trust") is already under scrutiny by the Charity Commission after complaints last year.

Your attempt to be condescending was terribly sweet, but perhaps next time you get to wondering about something, you could just look it up.

Would this be the same Tax Payer's Alliance

that used its charitable arm to dishonestly gain tax relief to fund research and lobbying?

Have they had their irony and hypocrisy glands surgically removed?

And really, Reg, you are supposed to be journalists. A key part of your job is to apply a bit of critical attention to press releases, not just blurt out their conclusions verbatim.

Telegraph to charge for online news

Somebody telephone the LSE

you may have discovered a whole new business model!

If they reduced their online readership to ... oh ... zero ... they could reduce costs by 100%. And if their paper readership drops to zero they can reduce their printing and distribution costs by 100%. Then they can sack all their journalists and editors ... why ... eventually their costs could all be reduced to zero!

Fanboi primer: How to move your iTunes from PC to Mac

But at least they'd know that you don't need a bash emulator for sed.

Number of people in this office fluent with sed and similar tools: 43

Number of people in this office using Macs: 1

Ri-i-i-ight ...

... because SED (or AWK or perl or Emacs or any of the other bajillion simple editors) are only available on Macs.

Most coders have sleep problems, need 'hygiene and care'

Re: PS: unless you want to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma

On the other hand, I think we can all agree that you should have put the word "and" in quotes and put a comma after the word "Actually".

Internet Rule 5: posts correcting grammar or spelling will almost inevitably feature worse mistakes

Can somebody put a safety gate across the stairs

little Lewis keeps wandering out of the nursery and trying to play with science.

Man cracks open floppy disk, inserts USB Flash drive

While I agree with your sentiments ...

I can't believe you passed up the opportunity for a crass Paris Hilton joke here.

Global warming is actually good for rainforests, say boffins

Dull poster is dull.

If your strongest response is to label somebody a troll then you've already failed.

(and you might want to look up the difference between "your" and "you're")

Welcome to the Lewis Page Straw Clutching Society newsletter.

I do hope nobody mentions the involvement of the following groups with this paper:

Colombian Petroleum Institute

Petróleos de Venezuela S.A.

Agencia Nacional de Hidrocarburos, Bogota

Much of recent global warming actually caused by Sun

So to summarise this article

"tl;dr"

Keene USB FM Transmitter

"Wireless music for 15 quid, surely not?"

You can buy an FM transmitter for under a tenner that will work with any OS or in fact any hardware with a headphone jack. For the extra few quid all I appear to be buying is some slightly flaky software on a mini CD and a wasted USB port.

80%? Are you suffering A-level grade inflation?

Ten Essential... iPad Accessories

Excellent

So I need to spend between three and six hundred quid for the 'essential' accessories for a device that only costs about five hundred quid? This is a definition of 'essential' that was carelessly missed out of my dictionary.

Samsung NaviBot robot cleaner

Dude

You don't need a robot vac or a human cleaner ... you need to move back in with your mum and be grounded until you learn how to look after yourself.

Filthier than Paris Hilton.

Lords: Analogue radio must die

Did you bother to read the report?

Far from saying "Analogue radio must die" it actually says

"for the foreseeable future, the Government will consider FM radio to be part of the broadcasting firmament"

and discusses the future of local BBC and commercial FM stations and even AM stations.

Perhaps you should just have posted a link to the report rather than writing an article that makes it sound like they're proposing to hang Wogan from Tower Bridge by his entrails and ship the cast of The Archers to Guantanamo bay.

Pentax preps 26x superzoom

focal length range versus zoom

"In addition, the X90 boasts a 26-276mm 35mm-equivalent focal length range"

That isn't "in addition". The 26-676 IS the 26x zoom.

(it's 676, not 276 ... didn't they teach your 26 times table at school?)

Zero-power LCD aims to reduce paper use

Innovation Fail

I had a 'zero power', 'paper-free', 'instant erase' sketching pad about thirty years ago. It came free with a packet of sugarpuffs and had a Honey Monster snakes and ladders game on the reverse.

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-WX1

@kay tie

In the time you've wasted posting to this thread you could have earned enough money to afford a nice 16gig MS with enough spare change to buy the people who share your office some earplugs to block out your incessant whining.

Europe welcomes Dell's Mac Mini Zino HD

@mrweekender

If you throw away the overpriced and unnecessary McAfee software and the business service option which is clearly not comparable with a standard warranty then the total for the Dell is £428.98 or about £250 cheaper than the mac mini. So what everybody seems to agree is an overpriced PC from one of the more expensive suppliers is still £250 cheaper than a mac mini.

I'm not entirely sure what point it was you were trying to make. But it must be true because it is in IMPORTANT UPPER CASE with exciting! exclamation marks so I suppose I'd better shut the F*CK UP.

Matrox makes eight-screen graphics card

At last!

Full 3D display for us spiders.

Panasonic parades 50in 3D plasma TV

re: but ...

What you need is two full-HD TVs and a pair of Clockwork-Orange-style eye-braces to point each eyeball at the relevant set.

Sharp launches ultra low power LCD TVs

re: Question?

You re-draw the screen multiple times to reduce flicker. In (non-digital) cinemas where the film frame rate is 24 fps, they typically flash up every frame three times to give an effective rate of 72 fps. You still only get 24 different images, but the flicker is less noticeable.

Digital TVs can be a bit more clever and imitate motion blur by interpolating between frames rather than showing the same frame several times in a row.

I suspect the move from 100Hz to 200Hz is just a marketing number though. I don't know anybody who can detect a flicker or stuttering motion on a 100Hz television. Or at 72 fps in a cinema for that matter.

Most gamers fat and miserable, finds study

OMG BMI WTF BBQ

Most gamers hyper-sensitive about accusations of being fat and miserable, finds comments section survey.

Cutting the cord: future mobile broadband tech

See me after class.

I can't really fault the general direction of this article, but if you are going to sprinkle it with technical info then you really should get it right.

CSD and GPRS are both digital. CSD does not convert data into audible tones. The difference between CSD and GPRS is that one is circuit switched and one is packet switched. The clue is in the name.

EDGE is categorically not a software upgrade, it uses an entirely different modulation scheme.

I put on my pedant's mortarboard at this point and clicked the comment button. I could probably be equally tedious about the rest of the article for the price of a pint.