Posts by TeeCee

Re: On another thought...

This can be cheaper than you might think.

I found this out the hard way doing a rebuild. Forgot to load the RAID drivers during the boot from install media process, repartitioned and formatted the HDD only to find out that, since the OS couldn't *see* the internal disks, what I'd just hosed good 'n proper was the the USB backup drive. Numb feeling. Cold sweat. Replace underpants.

An hour's squirrelling with Google turned up a nice, if somewhat idiosyncratic in its use of English, Chinese disk recovery utility costing 30 quid that got everything back for me.

@Jonathan

Yes, you're missing something. Using your analogy, you certainly don't want a whole page of Motorola retailers all carping on about how shite the N97 is and how you should buy a Motorola instead. The Nokia retailers are all allowed by Nokia to use the branding anyway (unless they're bent).

This is GooBlackmail 0.7 (Beta 2). What they're saying is: "You wouldn't want anything nasty to happen to your trademark now, would you? You know, like your competitors getting all the sales leads from searches for it? We can stop that happening for you. Now this may seem like a lot of money at first glance, but it's a small price to pay for staying in business around here, I'm sure you'll agree. Think of it as 'insurance' for your trademark."

You know? I think you could almost describe it as, er, evil...........

Re: Like buses

Did you really intend to invoke a mental picture of a veritable jism tsunami there?

Here, you can have this drycleaned.

Re: SAPPEUR

Hmm, sounds French with a name like that.

So, I'm getting: Idiosyncratic, pedantic, insular, only works for about four hours a day and anything written in it is apt to stop working and set fire to things at the drop of a hat.

Ulterior motive.

I'll bet that those $7m are seen as a loss-leader.

As in: "What do we do when we find one? Very perceptive of you sir and we're glad you asked. It just so happens that by sheer coincidence we have in our other pocket a proposal for a multi-billion dollar project to build a humungous, space-based, asteroid fragging beam weapon. Sign on the dotted line please."

PIN changing.

I'm guessing that the reason here is that this relates to MPs. So, armed with the data, you can try year of birth, year of wife's birth, year of election, last four digits of home / mobile / house of commons / constituency office phone number, without even starting to make an effort.

I'll bet this 'ere sackful of easily obtained cash that this lot gives you somewhere north of 50% of 'em. Trying the same numbers backwards is probably worth another 20-odd percent.....

Re: Great idea

I've said it before and I'll say it again.

If you're so clever, you design a battery pack that'll cater to both the space requirements of a two-seat city car and the power requirements of a 2.5 tonne SUV. Ensure that it's completely future proof as battery technology improves / changes.

Looking at the video, I'd say that that'll have trouble with next year's model of the same car, let alone something a completely different size and shape. $500,000 is a lot to pay for something that effectively comes with the word "obsolescent" stencilled on most of the bits.

Crystal ball time.

"Easyjet and Ryanair were among 36 sites promising to do better in future."

Five years from now:

"Ryanair were among 1 site promising to do better in future."

Let's face it. Their whole business model is based around loading the eyecatching, cheap fare with ripoff charges in the booking process and hoping that the punter can't be arsed to abort the process and bugger off elsewhere. Well, that and treating their customers like either cattle or shit as the mood takes them.

Wow!

There are iPhone users who can walk and chew bubblegum / email at the same time?

Who knew?

<Waits for inevitable flamefest>

Top tip!

"....able to locate and track individual terrorists with a high degree of accuracy."

Terrorists. Avoid unwanted US military attention by not following up those "cheap boots and shoes" offers that appear in your email inbox every day.

"In case you're concerned......"

Ok, exactly how is typing in a message and sending it to someone else to publish on a service less effort than typing the same message and sending it to the publishing service directly?

I bet that getting it entered on the ground has nothing to do with time saving for the astronaut and far more to do with the pesky "no signal" error on his phone which prevents him from SMSing Twatter himself.

"...grapple of the telescope...."

Presumably, they're expecting this to result in either three falls or a submission from the telescope.

What's the backup plan if the telescope wins?

The spandex leotard, thanks.

Pram for sale. Any offers.

I'd like a bit of Pram please.

Ah, yes sir. That's in good condition.

Oh good. I like them in good condition, eh? Eh?

@Chris

Thank you very much for that. Comprehensive, well-researched, serious and educational. So it looks in place here in the same way that a tray of pork pies and sausage rolls does at a Jewish wedding.

"........and octopodes pedantic."

So, "octopodes" for me from now on then.

@Dave

".....inventing new business paradigms....."

That sort of thing has no place in the real world and you should just let 'em get on with it.

Most important.

When's Captain Cyborg getting upgraded? Inquiring minds want to know. Surely nobody'll take him seriously if he doesn't have the latest and greatest version.........oh, wait.......

@Blitz

So, how's that work then? Big corporations can get away with whatever the fuck they like as long as they can stall any legal judgement until the next economic downturn?

Very clever, I'm sure.

Aha!

This'll be the work of that Crazy Frog I've heard mention of in the popular vernacular then, will it?

Not sure about this one.

"....perhaps with the aid of your trusty electric car as a power reservoir...."

If you wanted a battery to store power, why buy one in a lushly appointed metal box with wheels on it? Surely you'd just get a battery pack? For one thing, it'd be far less likely to bugger off to the shops for a loaf of bread when it was most needed.

Battle tip for the opposition.

Don't shoot until you see the whites of their iPhones.

If NASA don't buy it.

I see a market in novelty hats made out of it for the wingnut brigade.

Tinfoil's just so last millenium.

Solar activity down?

What should we blame this on? Global Warming, The Recession or Swine Flu?

Gotta give the Tabloid hacks something to work with.......

@Tom

Yes, but getting your bollocks firsthand doesn't make it anything more than bollocks.

As it's the 50th anniversary of the Mini this week, I suppose I'd better finish that reference on how John Lennon won the RAC Rally in 1968 driving a 1275 Cooper S.....

Re: If they want to put up anything...

I believe that the Luftwaffe were going to run a raid there, but by that time RAF Fighter Command had become dominant. The German pilots refused to go on the grounds that there was too high a risk of being seen dead in the Medway towns.....

Hmmm.

Anyone know what frequency's the preferred one for MI5's snooping gadgets?

It'd be fun to work out where they all are now we have a handy sou.................

*^&#^%$%

NO CARRIER

Re: Er...

"She used to be quite fit in her day."

There are pics elsewhere. She's very obviously had more plastic surgery than El Reg's box of Playmobil characters.

'nuff said.

@Greg Fleming

"If an OS had to parse the file header of every file it looked at it would run slower than molasses in January."

Crikey! I'm so glad my A/V suite doesn't scan the entire contents of everything I write to disk looking for known or similar to known byte sequences according to a heuristic detection algorithm, recursing archives as necessary My machine would be waaaay too slow to be usable then.

Oh, wait. It does and it isn't.........

Dear Ms. Smith.

I'm going to aquire some sheets of plastic and cut them into small rectangles suitable for you to turn into ID cards. I promise to be careful with the scissors.

I reckon this'll cost me about a tenner but, being a generous soul, I'm going to "allow" you to pay me a million pounds for them.

Textbooks.

I don't know about everyone else, but I find that a good, old-fashioned, dead tree edition thumps the shit out of a digital version for useability when it comes to reference materials.

I find that skimming and flicking through a printed index is infinitely more likely to find me what I'm looking for than relying on someone else to have thought to link topic x to topic y. Also an on-screen index just doesn't give that ability to take the whole thing in at a glance and have the potentially related items jump out at me. I've no idea why.

The thing that really pisses me off about the dash to e-publishing is the one thing it's bound to do is drive up the price of the more useful printed version.....

I can't believe it!

Only 45% of the next generation of lawyers are cheating, lying, unethical bastards?

Standards really are slipping.

What could possibly go wrong?

'Among her proposals for a fully privatized ICANN is for the organization to be overseen by an independent international forum, as well as a "G-12 for internet governance" '

Ah. Run by politicians and civil servants in other words.

So, mired in international political infighting, no advances of any note will be made in the structure of the internet for the rest of eternity then. Small, urgent changes that nobody could possibly object to will take place in a timeframe measured in decades.

This is without a doubt the dumbest proposal in the entire history of technological innovation and, as a strategy, is probably on a par with pulling wires out at random as regards ensuring the smooth operation of the internet.

So what you're saying is:

1) Spooks spend lots of cash on complicated things that can listen to what other people are saying.

2) Spooks are secretive and won't tell you what it is that they can listen to or whether or not they're listening to it.

3) Major contractors are quite happy to board the spook / complicated listening things / huge budget gravy train and can be quite secretive about it all when it suits them.

Now, just one slight area of confusion to clear up. Which religion is the Pope a member of?

Netbooks.

The classic Netbook is small, low powered (in both 'leccy and computing grunt) and designed to be used as an appliance for cloudy apps.

Both Linux and Windows (apart from V****, obviously) are eminently suited as the OS, by dint of the ability to turn off the eye-candy and cruft, providing the bare minimum of features to run a browser and service the cloud apps served within it, making the most of the sub-par hardware underneath.

What's left if you turn off the eye-candy and cruft in MacOS..............?

The Oilskin and Sou'wester please. I'm expecting to be pelted with rotting, but partially nibbled, fruit on the way out.

T-mobile Customer service.

Here's a short transcript (from memory) of a conversation I had with a T-mobile call-centre a few years ago, just after they'd rejigged their initial menus:

"Hi there. I've had a bit of trouble getting through. You do know there's no option to get to speak to someone in your new menu structure?"

"Yes there is. You just press zero at the main menu."

"Yes, I know that. But I know it from previous experience, tried it on the off chance and was pleased to find it still works. You don't actually *tell* anyone this option exists, it's hidden."

"No, it's definately in the options list."

<a couple of minutes of pantomime "oh no it isn't" / "oh yes it is" stuff>

"Is it quiet round there these days?"

"It's funny you should say that! We were just saying before you rang how very quiet it's been here recently.".............

Looks like they asked for it.

So Google applied for the trademark and it was turned down 'cos it was already in use?

And they went ahead with it anyway?

And now the original holder's sueing the shit out of them?

I guess that nobody could possibly have seen that one coming....

@Chris Adams.

It wasn't just the charging that did for Netscape.

The fact that Netscape 4 shipped as a bloat-laden shitheap that needed a RAM upgrade on our Dell P90s to get off its fat arse and do anything useful, while IE4 shipped as a lean, mean, fighting machine prompted a mass migration where I was at the time. We had the global, paid for license, it's purely that the product stunk like a pile of rotting badgers that forced us off it.

I remember remarking at the time when I compared the two, that if you were to take a guess as to which was the product of the exciting, go-ahead, small, responsive company and which was the product of the bloat-addicted, corporate sales focussed, evil software empire, you'd be wrong.

Well, I'll be.....

It's possible to make spam out of dubious pig by-products? Who knew?

"Posted in Small Biz"

Ah, not "Bootnotes" then? so:

Where's the IT angle?

YEEEESSSSSS!

<high five>

Silly Baaaaastards.

That should say it all, but apparently a comment is required, in addition to a title.