Posts by John P

Re: (KB4480970) Also hoses Windows 7 32 bit on Tosh Lappy

Never attribute to malice that which can be equally explained by incompetence! :)

I have an odd relationship with WPF.

I appreciate that it is extremely flexible and you can do pretty much whatever you want with it and that's great. However, if you want to step one foot beyond basic, you've got to become a 300 level expert before you can get any further. If, like me, you only dip in to it every now and then, it means every time having to relearn massive amounts of XAML just to slightly tweak how your textbox is rendered.

I thought they solved the ClearType issues years ago when VS switched to using WPF for its UI?

As for EF, I can't disagree. EF Core solves some of those issues but progress on it is so glacial that I'm glad they decided to just port EF6 over. The Stack Overflow approach to ORMs is a pragmatic one that I am starting to err on the side of: use Dapper for your selects so you've got all the control you need on your retrieval, just use L2S/EF for your complicated inserts & updates.

Re: Not impressed with Barclays

Barclays are horrifically backwards in some senses.

I signed up for an ISA a year ago and the information pack that came through informed me that I could only put money in to that ISA by visiting a branch.

Screw that, I closed the ISA almost immediately.

I'm less bothered by the existence of the telemetry than I am by how shady MS implemented them. If they just offered a screen on install with simple toggles to allow you to customise which bits are sent, most home users will just click ok to all anyway and those of us who are more conscious of these things could turn off all the bits that bother us without having to resort to third-party apps to dig in and set all the registry keys for them.

As a user, I haven't really noticed that the updates are any more forced that on previous versions, but I can appreciate the concern that network admins have about this. Again, being a bit more upfront about the whole situation and providing better GPO control of these things would eliminate virtually all of the worries admins have about these.

It's the same old MS in that they could've so easily alleviated all of these concerns, but seem intent on shooting themselves in the foot at every turn.

I've had the SP4 since November and have never had any power issues with it. Some have though, I'm not sure if recent driver updates have fixed it for the SP4.

Side note: Where in the article does it say that MS won't fix it, as per the headline? Did I miss or is that a click-bait headline?

Re: Early adopters ....

While it's the 4th gen of Surface, it's only the 2nd of the current form factor I think, although I fully agree that they really should've got their act together by now.

One has to wonder though what percentage of Surface users have actually had problems, as the ones with issues will always be the ones to post on forums, social media, etc.

I've had the SP4 since early November and have had no real issues with it. I get the occasional screen flicker when watching videos in Edge, but that's about it. Overall, I've been incredibly happy with it, most reliable machine I've ever had that I didn't build myself.

Re: Cortana Knows my name...(so does MS and 'partners', uncles, aunts, 2nd cousins...)

Of course the answer to why is Cortana. As fun as conspiracy theories are, I think the simplest answer here is also the most likely to be true.

In order for their digital assistant to work in any half-decent way, it needs all of this information to build up a profile of you.

This does not take in to account the fact that many users with Windows 10 do not use Cortana. I like the ability to set quick reminders by typing plain English, but other than that I have no use for it. I'm not against the concept and can see how it could be useful for some people, but I'm just not sufficiently disorganised that I need a constant watcher to organise my life for me.

I'm okay with this being the price if you really want to use Cortana and enable it to do all the recommendation, telling you about flights, informing you its your wedding anniversary tomorrow and your wife is already pissed off with you because she texted you complaining that you hadn't done the washing up again, but Cortana, along with all the information it needs to work, should have a simple and complete off-switch.

If MS just provide this, all those who hate the idea of MS slurping their data and who don't need Cortana will be happy, and all those willing to pay the data price for having Cortana work will also be happy. Simple.

Re: Warning! Incoming - JimS

We've got a few MFPs and an ancient HP LaserJet 2300, which just works and is still going strong.

Windows 7 dealt with all of these pretty well once you found the right drivers. Windows 8 was a massive ball-ache to get set up for all of them, lots of patching inf files and trying 17 different ways to use a driver it really didn't want to use. Windows 10 however, upon being told to look for printers on the network, found all of them almost instantly and set itself up with absolutely no intervention from me.

I had to send a test page to each one as I thought it was lying to me. No OS will ever be perfect but, from my personal experience, Windows 10 has made massive improvements in both the upgrade and peripheral experience.

Re: preview on mouseover in Edge?

The preview is when you hover over a tab, not a link.

I remember when Opera had that feature back in the day, it's really useful if you're doing a lot of research on websites with extremely unhelpful titles.

Re: Oh dear

Focusing on Enterprise for WP seems to be the trick MS are missing currently. The decline of Blackberry is leaving a gap that MS would be the natural candidate to fill given that most IT departments run AD and Microsoft device management products. WP is a good product, just way too late to the party, I really hope they can find a good healthy market for it.

I've got the Band 1, mainly to give myself a kick up the ass to get a bit fitter. But I have found it invaluable for the notifications. Emails and texts come through, and with a quick peak at the band I can see if they're worth reading in full or not, the phone comes out of my pocket a lot less often these days, which gives the kids much less opportunity to try and steal it for gaming. Also, having it tell me how many steps I've done, miles, etc, is a really good motivator for a naturally physically-lazy individual such as myself.

One minor correction on the HoloLens though, it is untethered so you're not plugged in to a PC, you're wearing it. I suspect this will go the way of the Kinect, a great idea in theory but with very little mainstream use. This isn't necessarily a bad thing though as the Kinect is a profitable unit despite being a niche product.

And the apps look like Android too!

Re: Rain, Rain, Go Away

A friend of mine had a similar situation, a council's server room was located underground directly under some public toilets. Every time they overflowed or there was a bit of rain, it rained in the server room and it filled up with several feet of water.

Their solution: Raise the servers up AND build a corrugated plastic roof over the servers with guttering to move the rain away. Wellies were provided at the door with explicit instructions to not ask what was in the water!

Re: Angst

Have you tried WinPhone 10?

WP8 is the first mobile OS I have actually liked using. WP10 currently looks like a cheap Android imitation, most if not all of the UI features of WP8 that I like are gone or on the way out. I sincerely hope they make some drastic changes before release, but I think that is unlikely at this point.

I'm not liking the way this is going...

Re: Just one thing left to make it good

The problem I always had with the old start menu was down to the fact that every manufacturer laid out their directories differently, and a lot of suppliers aren't even consistent within their own application, Microsoft included.

Once you've got a decent amount of applications installed, it soon became a mess. I always ended up manually organising it myself in to categories, but this had its own downside when you came to uninstalling or upgrading things.

I never used Search before Windows 8 as it was just too slow. While it still isn't 100% perfect, it works for me now 99% of the time and it is definitely lower maintenance than organising things myself.

Search isn't a silver bullet, but for day to day use, I find it serves me pretty well these days.

Re: That Reminds Me

While this is pretty bad news in many ways, part of me wonders if getting out of the rat-race competing with actual phone hardware companies, will allow them to create a good reference device, like a Surface Phone. Could get interesting...

Re: Uninstaller??

MS have acknowledged recently what we have all known for ages, it is impossible to completely remove an application as if it was never there. Once an application is on the system it can do too many things completely uncontrolled for that to be possible.

They're now starting to advertise appx as the solution to this. As appx gives the application it's own hive for registry and file system, it should theoretically be a lot easier to remove an application as it's changes have been isolated.

I think they're only advertising it for UWP apps at the moment, but as the appx format came from their purchase of Softgrid, which later became AppV, I'm hoping they'll give some guidance on using it with Win32 apps as well, hopefully something that doesn't involve sequencing!

Of course, it'll take the various divisions of Microsoft another 20 years to switch from MSI to appx, so whether that will be of any help for MS applications in the short term is another question.

Re: US Engineering

I don't get it, swiping up from the bottom for menus is so natural and easy, why must they break the good parts!

Not everyone is having trouble with this. Successfully updated on VM, Lenovo Helix, and Surface Pro with no problems at all.

Re: Insider here

I think what you probably needed to do was link your local account to a Microsoft account, thereby getting the best of both worlds as you still log in to your PC with your local account, but the Microsoft account is there for applications that need it. I do this on my machine at home and my domain-joined machines at work and have never had any problems.

Re: There's 15 minutes difference between Nepal time and India time

The description of the Google method is confusing. It says they're slowing down their clocks and adding the second at the end. But surely, if they're just adding the second, they don't need to slow the clocks down first?

AWS are lengthening their seconds so the leap second will have been added in tiny proportions every second until it is back in sync with how it should be.

Re: overstreched

and dictionaries :)

It clearly states "when enabled by an administrator", so this is going to be much like Bitlocker or any other security feature that MS have introduced over the last 10 years, a great feature but you only turn it on if you know it won't cause you any issues.

Re: You haven't used Windows 10 Build 10041 yet then.

10049 is even worse, made my laptop completely unusable. On a positive front,a fresh install of 8.1 then upgrade to 10041 and finally 10049 is looking much more positive.

Pre-10041 I was feeling quite confident about Windows 10 given the smoothness of the upgrade from 7 to 8, it looked like Microsoft were going to achieve the same success again. Now I'm a little worried and am preparing for a fresh install and possibly wait until the 364th day of the 1 year free upgrade.

Re: When do we see an Windows phone with Android?

I'm a WP user and would probably also qualify as one of those "MS" fans, I couldn't care less if Cortana is on IOS,Android,Blackberry or any other phone OS. I don't use them so it doesn't affect me in the slightest.

I've got no issue with MS going after market share, it's a good way to raise recognition of MS in the mobile space and maybe even improve WP's market share a bit.

Re: Good work MS

That was my first thought, but according to Scott Hanselman there won't be a shell.

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheNewRaspberryPi2WillRunWindows10AndRunUniversalApps.aspx

So while possibly not a super-cheap office PC, I can still see loads of uses for this.

MS have achieved one thing with this though, getting up to speed with Universal apps is now looking like it may just be worth it.

I believe the barge is a remote controlled drone, so no humans in danger at any point.

Re: About time....

If MS or any other vendor ignore reports of bugs, then they should be disclosed in order to shame them in to sorting it out.

However, in both the recent cases, MS have said they have a fix and have asked Google to withhold disclosure for a short amount of time until they can get it out. Where a software vendor is clearly taking the bugs reported by Google seriously and is doing something about it, but just needs a little extra time to issue a fix, Google should be more flexible and work with the vendors in that situation.

In my work, we have a few software packages that run on WES7/8, XP, 7 and 8. To fix bugs and fully test them can take a week or more depending on their severity and how many platforms the issue is present on, and I dare say MS have a lot more platforms to test against. Testing takes time, and sticking to the 90 day limit rigidly either exposes users to flaws unnecessarily or will encourage vendors to rush fixes out without proper testing, which may cause more damage than it prevents.

Re: No way, no how

My last phone was a HTC One X, a great phone when it came out with good battery life, but successive Android updates rendered it unable to last a working day, otherwise I was satisfied with the phone. If had been able to just buy a new higher-capacity battery module for a reasonable price, I probably would've.

The other reason I eventually went with the Lumia 1020 was for the excellent camera as my existing separate digital camera was no longer up to the job. Again, if I'd been able to just buy a better camera module for a reasonable price, I would've done that.

Having the upgradeability that the Ara range provides for a reasonable price probably would've kept me on Android.

Re: Sorry, but Google were uttely wrong.

If MS had completely ignored Google and not given them any information on when a fix would be available, I would have less of an issue with what Google did and the blame would be on MS for not communicating properly with them on the matter.

But MS did tell them that a fix was coming with a release date and asked them to delay disclosure for a couple of weeks until it was out. Google had a definitive time frame when a fix would be available and they stuck to the 90 days anyway, knowingly creating risk for users who may be vulnerable to the exploit.

So in this case, Google are firmly in the wrong IMHO.