Posts by TeeCee

National newspaper? That reminds me.

As some commentard pointed out at the Toadygraph earlier, the Grauniad declared for the Lib Dems and so has, effectively, ended up supporting a Tory government.

Now *their* comment forums are worth their pixels in entertainment value today.......

Re: Typical

Yup, I'm forcibly reminded of that picture taken in the House at the first budget with Brown as PM. Alistair Darling looking like someone had just shoved a pineapple up his arse sitting next to Brown who was obviously enjoying a joke.

I mentally captioned it: "What's so funny?". "Ah, I was just thinking it could have been worse. Last year this would have been my fault.".

Slithering off to leave someone else in the firing line just as the true scale of his cockup becomes apparent? Typical indeed.

Ah, channel 13.

For some reason, some yank kit seems to have a bit of a problem up there. I used to have a USR WiFi router that, while it recognised 12 and 13 as OK to use in Europe, wouldn't give me the time of day if I set it there, despite the bands being "clean" and everything else being happy to talk peer-to-peer up there.

Testing for compliance with international standards? In America? You're kidding, right?

Just for added complication: http://www.geekzone.co.nz/inquisitor/2996

Re: pedantry corner

You forget that if that ever gets settled, the next argument is about whether where it is placed actually qualifies as a corner, or whether it is in fact a column, a box, a forum or whatever........

FOB.

In Incoterms, Free On Board.

In context here, it's the thing* on your keyring that ain't a key. It may be an NFC tag**, it may be a thingy with buttons wot opens your car, it may have a torch built in, it may just be a piece of pink plastic with "Hello Kitty" written on it.

Most often it's the leather thing with the Porsche badge on it to identify the keys you use to operate your clapped out Ford Escort.......

*It is permissible to have more than one.

**Yeah, I know, but I'm *trying* to stay on-topic here.

Wrong.

The Norton Removal Tool can (a free download from your local Symantec site). It's actually rather good at doing this and is possibly the only uninstall tool issued by a software maker that really does remove every last squeak of their bloody products without leaving you to hoover out the corners afterwards.

If you change your Norton upgrade process to: Run removal tool / install new version of the bit you're replacing / reinstall all the old things you want back*, you can wave goodbye to all those pesky b0rken upgrade issues that Symantec are so justifiably famous for.

I'm forced to wonder why, given the bleedin' obvious implication that they *can* get it right when they want to, the supplied uninstaller doesn't though.

I'll leave it to the assembled multitudes to ponder the irony inherent in the fact that the most reliable and fully functional piece of code in the Norton product lineup is the tool for removing their products.....

*You may need to add "call 'em up to reset their crappy licensing system for all the reinstalled old stuff" at this point :-(

Nah!

They should give it a case made of solid granite.

There's nothing quite like a Hard Rock Hurricane. Well........I don't think there is.....It was all a bit of a blur after the sixth one.........

Nah.

British troops only hide round corners from things they're afraid of. Therefore Yanks always get to shoot at 'em in the open.

Whether the British troops aren't afraid of 'em 'cos they're not expecting to be shot at or just 'cos they think they're crap is open to discussion......

Have an icon.

"As long as they're not mislabeled or stolen, and the customer knows what he's getting, then there's nothing wrong with a market for third party products."

They wouldn't be bloody counterfeit in that case then, would they? The very point of counterfeit products is that they are *not* labelled correctly as third-party products. Your point was what exactly?

The aeroplane point from the OP is spot on. Quite a few people died not too long ago due to substandard fake Convair (IIRC) tail mounting bolts sold as genuine parts. The subsequent crackdown and audit on parts revealed something of a chamber of horrors in the overall US parts stock. All aircraft spares now have an auditable chain from manufacture to scrap as a result of this.

Nah, way OTT.

Try putting a couple of fresh mackerel* in the cabin air intake. For added fun, prepare the ground by spreading a rumour that your victim has a weird sexual thing for fish.

Always good for a laugh.

*Some cars don't have a convenient place in their intakes for fish. In such cases, pouring in half a pint of double cream often does the trick. Unfortunately the demise of paper tape and the widespread fitting of pollen filters has put paid to the hysterically funny** "instant snowglobe" trick.

**Which is what you're *really* after. Everyone else to laugh themselves silly at the SOB and take the piss out of them rather than you.

Not dumb.

Apart from the cache volatility bit, which isn't the issue here. Note that SSDs also sport cache(!) If non-volatile cache is what you want, there's a thing called a rechargeable battery that does this without all that tedious fannying about with SSDs and cache copy algorithms.

What you've just described is what most, if not all, the enterprise storage vendors offer, a tiered solution with both rotating disk and SSDs. The more frequently accessed data is held on the SSD's for performance as SSDs have no stroke/latency overhead on Read and Update operations. The disk controller handles the migration of data between the conventional disk and the SSDs transparently.

What would be bloody sexy is if someone implemented a storage driver for PCs to do this automagically, so you could plug in a small SSD and a big disk and present 'em as one device. MS got part way there with ReadyBoost in Vista, but they FAILed big time (surprise) by restricting its use to USB "thumb" drives, so the I/O throughput loss here neatly offsets the seek gains. I reckon this could be the next "must have" on enthusiast mobos, replacing / supplementing RAID.

Re: you don't mean diesel..

Yes, I pointed that one out last time they said it round here. Guess it fell on deaf ears.

I suppose it pisses off the CO2 freaks when you point out that the shiny, new oil-burners they're pushing can't be easily converted to run on an enormously wide variety of renewable / cleaner power sources like petrol cars can.

Oh, you'd need the injector holes for LNG injectors, so you'd have to drill new ones for the plugs. You'd need to swap the ECU and add coils, crank position sensors et. al. too. Trying to get it to run "dual fuel" while LNG availability became widespread would be an entertaining exercise. All in all, it'd almost certainly be far cheaper and simpler to rip the lump out and shove in a petrol one.

The really funny side of this would be that the big losers were this to take off would be the, er, German car industry. The Japanese heavy investment in efficient petrol / gas (very big on CNG / LPG / LNG they are) engines would pay dividends, leaving the diesel-fixated Germans several years of expensive development up a blind alley.

You forgot:

Who inherited a booming economy in surplus and pissed all the money on the wall so, when the inevitable downturn came, we all got right, royally fucked Big Time?

Also: "Which party actually invaded Iraq?" is relevant in there too, since you brought it up.

Using Iraq in your Tory-bashing rather reminded me of the fact that "Almeida" is recorded on the Arc de Triomphe. As Cornwell rather memorably put it: "They obviously didn't have enough victories to fill it up, so they put a few defeats on there too.".

Supersharp knives.

Yes, but. You can get fancy alloys that preserve an edge like nobody's business, I have some knives like this. The problem is that when said edge does eventually blunt, they're a bitch to sharpen. The ceramic "steel" that came with is useless, a standard steel won't sniff at 'em and the only workable solution appears to be trotting off to use the bench grinder in the garage(!)

A set of Sabatiers can be made sharp enough to shave with* at the drop of a hat, courtesy of a few easy swipes with a standard sharpening steel. One of the best presents I ever got in the "things that don't have a plug on the end" category.

*Presumably and cut a SIM with too. Gotta stay on topic you know......

Re: Sir

Yup, they look like this:

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/09_01/cabinetlineupPA_468x192.jpg

Let me fix that:

"Everyone else supports Theora and OGG."

Everyone else except Apple supports Theora and OGG.

There, that's better.

Actually, the only people taking the right approach here are Google, who quite happily support both codecs so the world can get on with its pissing contest in the background while they concentrate on doing something useful.

Damn. I've just had to support Google. I feel dirty now.

Re: Flash Gordon

I was going to say Dan Dare myself, but I reckon you've nailed it there.

I like it too. Timeless, in a sort of retro-futuristic way. Dunno what Wired are on, must be more than a bit of petty jealousy at work I guess.

Simples!

It's called a plea bargain and requires that you have something to bargain with. In this case, two million dollars.

They get a guilty plea, a signed confession to one specimen count and an easy ride recovering the money and assets. He gets five years and a ban from ever touching banking systems ever again.

He could have plead not guilty, had all the charges chucked at him and ended up being banged up with the key discarded. Then they'd have invoked asset recovery and screwed every cent they could out of him anyway. It would just have taken a lot longer and made a few lawyers quite a bit richer.

OI!

I strongly object to your use of the word "we" in connection with Sarah Palin.

I'm not sure that the word "evolved" is entirely appropriate in context either.....

Be careful what you wish for.....

......even in jest.

There's a Sanrio store in Milan. It's like a sort of insane version of John Lewis, with every single sodding item in there pink and Hello Kitty branded. Since they had a 50cc scooter, a washing machine, a suite of bedroom furniture and a 50" LCD telly in the window, I wouldn't mind taking a punt that there was an airconditioning unit squirrelled away in there somewhere.

@Glen Turner 666

I think you're doing McAfee an injustice there.

I'm sure that they're shit enough to produce a catastrophic fuckup regardless of which O/S they ship the product on.

Hint: If you buy a pair of tyres for your Ford from Kwik-fit and all the tread falls off them in 500 miles, do you blame Ford?