Posts by h4rm0ny

Re: "You use Office 365, SQL Server or Azure, right?"

Office 365 is actually just the subscription model. I think you have it confused with their free "Office Online". If you have a subscription to Office 365 you get both an installable version and you can use the online version. Office 365.

Re: "You use Office 365, SQL Server or Azure, right?"

Actually, I do use Office 365 and Azure. I quite like them. They're both very good services. If you're not interested, then perhaps don't click on posts which are an invitation to a MS event about them.

Re: Will they cover their NSA links ?

Probably the same as Google and Apple and any other US corporation says, no?

Re: The real problem is C

>>"Well there are 25 other letters in the alphabet...choose one."

Well in that case, I choose D. It's a lovely language - essentially a rebuild of C++ with an "if we knew then what we know now" approach. But it may not satisfy the OP's criteria. I'm interested to see if they have an answer, or only a criticism.

Well it was a Google engineer who found the flaw, so some credit there at least.

Re: The real problem is C

"There is only one answer... ban C"

In favour of...?

Volunteers are not necessarily less (or more) competent than paid people and in any case, a lot of Open Source development is actually paid for by large companies. Open Source does not necessarily mean written by volunteers.

Regardless, flaws happen in proprietary code and in Open Source code. I've never been convinced there's an intrinsic bias either way. There is a rather exaggerated idea about "a thousand eyes" leading to fewer flaws in Open Source software. That's never been that supportable. The advantages of Open Source are not magic lack of vulnerabilities. The advantages of Open Source are that you can check it for deliberate subversion - e.g. government backdoors and because it can be forked at any time, you're hopefully protected against lock-in and projects being abandoned. (Though Google do their best on the former).

I suppose some might say I've missed "free" off the list above, but to quote the Great Wookie himself: "Free as in speech, not free as in beer". Any serious customers are likely to go with whatever solution is best rather than cheapest.

But the essential point is that companies like RedHat, SuSE, et al. are not small companies and it's not a pile of volunteer code. Some of it is, but it's the testing side that matters more than the development side in matters like this.

Re: My phone

I was about to ask a question about the self-employed, actually. Anyone know if this applies to contractors who lease their services? Because if it doesn't, I'm tempted to move to Paris for a couple of years and clean up.

Re: Authorised

The law is an ass. If I'm trusting another party with my details and I have doubts about their security, I'm going to check it.

I probably wouldn't do that if it involved testing explosives against a safe or something else that caused damage, but if I can inspect without breaking something, I will.

>>"Those aren't even competing market segments..."

Of course they are - there are a lot of people who used to have a PC purely for a bit of email and web-browsing. The iPad (and now other devices) have significantly eaten into that. Similarly the iPhone killed off any possible future for Windows Mobile by showing just how antiquated it was, and forced MS to reinvent things from the ground up with Windows Phone. Tablet and laptop sales have directly impacted desktop PCs, rising as the latter falls. And a significant part of "tablet and laptop", is tablet.

The Windows Store is a direct response to the stores on Android and iOS devices.

>>"I don't want a curating team blocking apps and using spurious reasons why your app can't be put on the Play store."

I agree. But Microsoft spent over a decade offering an OS with no curation whatsoever and the expectation that users knew what they were doing. MS grew up in an era where computer users were technical people and they kept assuming that. And then Apple came along and beat them up with iPhones and iPads. Now MS think that's what people want and are pushing their own store.

You can have educated users or you can have passively looked after users. The two are always in conflict.

Re: Patched

>>"It's frightening when you think of how long it takes proprietary software vendors to acknowledge and fix bugs."

Sigh. There's no misfortune someone wont seize upon to push their polemnic. There's no intrinsic reason why this should get fixed any faster than a proprietary solution - indeed it was out there for two years which really just goes to show how far the "thousand eyes" falls short once software becomes complex. Ten eyes is usually nearer the mark, most of which are under so much pressure it's really no different to the same ten eyes working for a proprietary company.

This is really unfortunate and has serious consequences. On this occasion it happened with Open Source, next time it might be proprietary. But in both cases, response times can be the same. The only real difference being that discovered vulnerabilities are usually announced at the same time the fix is released, not before.

The advantage of Open Source is not magical availability of fixes or freedom from bugs. The advantage of Open Source is that it can be built on and maintained by others, meaning freedom from lock-in and project abandonment, and that you can verify it is not deliberately compromised, e.g. by a government. These are good advantages. The idea that it is inherently less prone to bugs or given to quicker patching, is PR.

Re: The fat lady has sung

>>"Yup. One more mass extinction and if it includes humans don't think this great big rock we currently occupy will shed even a single tear. I'm pretty well convinced we're but termites on this rock and when we go the only irony in our small opinion will be that the rock won't care and will go about with whatever the grand plan of the rock was because we're only important to and trying to save ourselves. The rock doesn't care."

So what you're saying is that the rock doesn't care?

Okay, I can get alongside that. Now make a convincing case that we should care whether the rock cares, or whether we should care about whether we care.

Re: Of course its true!

>>"If I sell a product with such software on board, I certainly do. This might be the reason MS is not going after Google (or maybe there are secret agreements, where's me tinfoil hat!!)"

It's the former. Google are not stupid. They found they could make money through people using Android rather than selling it, and so they avoid having to pay licences by giving it away. Samsung et al. are the ones who have to pay. MS probably could go after Google with them in some very minor way (I think Google has a few tiny channels they technically make money direct from Android), but it would be trivial and a waste. MS want money at the end of the day - they're simple like that.

Re: Why permit the secrecy

>>"If it isn't, it's certainly arguable that the end user should be able to know what patents they are using."

Certainly I'd be interested to find out, but the "end user" to Microsoft is the company paying to use them to build a phone, not people MS have no dealing with who later buy phones from that company. As was given, there are some solid commercial reasons to keep details of which patents they are confidential. All we can really conclude is that if lawsuit-happy behemoths such as Samsung are willing to pay, that's strong evidence that the patents are robust.

Re: Looks quite nice

>>"To be honest H4rm0ny, that is not something I've ever thought about. When I switch phones or make updates, I just start from zero, when it comes to SMS. I've never thought about exporting them"

That's because you don't have a business or legal requirement to keep records of your communications, or have ever been involved in a legal case where you're required to provide records of what you sent and when to someone as part of your defence. (Happens a lot if you're fighting for custody of your child). Or simply want not to lose precious messages you exchanged early on in a relationship with someone you care about or to lose things sent to you by someone who has passed on.

Exporting SMS is a basic feature that phones have had for over a decade. It's shocking that WP can't manage this basic task.

Re: Incorrect

>>The problem is, 'tuned' to the lower hardware specs usually means we have disabled your ability to do something because it would work too slowly

I never wrote tuned to lower specs and nor did the OP. We talked about a more limited range of hardware and how that helped it to run more quickly. The OP said it supported a smaller range of SoC. That is correct. I pointed out that this is one of the principle reasons they have been able to tune WP so finely and that this is one of the reasons it runs well on lower spec.

You misunderstand how this works - running better on lower spec hardware isn't a different way of saying does less, anymore than my removing bloat from a piece of software is a way of doing less. Throwing out the kitchen sink is only a disadvantage if you need the kitchen sink. And in this case the kitchen sink is not features, but hardware support. And that's fine because when I buy a Lumia 820, I don't care that the Lumias are made only with chipset X and it wont run on phones that use chipset Y. I only care that it runs faster on chipset X as a result.

The manufacturer of chipset Y might care, and it might reduce the number of providers of phones running WP (possibly). But none of this makes it a worse experience for the purchaser of a current WP device - it makes it better due to less bloat.

Re: The Tolkien poem for Microsoft

Old joke is old.

This is the modern era and we have three "Dark Lords", nowadays. MS may still be Sauron in the land of Enterprise, where the shadows lie. But Apple are like what would have happened if Galadriel had taken the ring - beautiful, irresistible and tyrannical. And Google I guess if Saruman hadn't been beaten up by trees. They looked into Mordor, envied the power of the Dark Lord and set themselves to become a reflection of that power (albeit perhaps a sneakier, more subtle version of it because they're a wizard and played by Christopher Lee).

Re: Hooray!

You're showing a marked lack of understanding of development, planning and production timescales. All of this will have been done under Ballmer. You think the new person started last week and suddenly they've brought out a revised version of WP?

Re: Incorrect

>>"Quite. One of the problems with WP is that it only supports a limited set of specific SoCs, most from 2012. It seems that 8.1 will, later this year, support some additional ones, even some quad core."

That's actually one of its advantages. Sounds odd, but the very focused hardware support is one of the reasons why WP runs so fantastically well on low-end hardware. Android has the kitchen sink approach and so Android fans (not the same as Android users) often attack WP for having lower specced hardware in its phones, e.g. not having a quad-core version. But WP is highly tuned to a narrow range of pre-chosen hardware and doesn't need that horsepower. In fact, it would be counter-productive as the lower-specced hardware it can get away with places less demand on the battery and also frees up more money for things like the battery.

>>"Android can support newer SoCs much quicker"

There's no intrinsic reason why that should be the case. New chip comes out that MS want to support, they can just as easily allocate engineers as Google can.

Re: Looks quite nice

Andrew - can it finally export SMS messages? (And no, I don't mean back up the phone so that you can just load everything onto your next phone, I mean export). This has been a staggering lack in WP from the first version and makes it useless for many business people and legal requirements. As well as for those who just care about losing long-kept txts because they accidentally hit "delete thread".

Re: Server-side authentication

First people complain about "always online" requirements, then they complain there aren't "always online" requirements. ;)

Re: @BeerTokens beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?

>>"But is that actually at all likely? I'd imagine most people buy tablets in general mainly for reasons beyond work - certainly not 'mainly' for the core tasks"

I think it is likely, and becomes more so. The iPad took off through non-work use cases and that's where it achieved market dominance. Certainly you could use it for limited work scenarios, but it was the couch surfers and coffee-shop browsers who drove the sales. However, we're now seeing tablets start to become effective for work. You're seeing more work related software on the iPad (hmmm, what would be a good example - oh yes, MS Office) and I have a Surface 2 and it's a surprisingly effective tool for work within a wide range of scenarios. I mean it runs Office, has a full-featured web-browser and connects to pretty much any printer, monitor, external hard-drive, keyboard, mouse, whatever that most people will run into. And it has all the enterprise integration you'd normally want such as centralized management, real user accounts, etc. It's an enterprise tablet. A lot of the time I'll just take that rather than my laptop. I've even programmed on it given that I can remote desktop to a more powerful machine and it has an adequate keyboard on the thing.

There's no reason Apple cannot do similar. Actually, with MS Office on there, I think (and hope) they will. It takes time for a market to shift, but a tablet as a portable and dockable work machine is possible now and it's only going to get slicker and more powerful with time.

Re: beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?

>>"Sounds like an excuse looking for an issue. Cross platform support is part of what has made many open source projects so popular, Apache, OO, mySQL, to name but a few."

I think cross-platform support is a selling point for end-user software. Photoshop, Office, et al. But for server-side products, are there really that many people running MySQL or Apache on Windows? I know that you _can_, but has it actually been a factor in their popularity? All the installs I've seen in the wild are running on GNU/Linux. I'm open to being corrected.

Re: Eastenders Game

I don't watch either Coronation Street or Eastenders, but do they ever do cross-overs? I think they should do cross-overs. It would be like Avengers Assemble.

Re: re: Is this an average? as I thought the Earth's orbit was elliptical?

Which distorts it even further away from the mean of aphelion and perihelion, toward the longer distance! Come on El Reg. All we ask is a little integration!

Re: re: Is this an average? as I thought the Earth's orbit was elliptical?

Yes, it's the mean of aphelion and perihelion. My point was that due to the elliptical orbit, that value is not the same as the mean or "average" distance from the Sun. It is a lazy approximation.

To visualize this, imagine the orbit is a big train track in an ellipse. There's a point very near one end of the ellipse. Now the train spends a year going around the track and every day you note down the distance of the train from that point at one end. At the end of its journey you add up all the distances and divide by 365 (it's not a leap year). This value will not be the same as adding up the nearest and furthest point and dividing by two. And you can visualize why not just picturing that train's journey. Most days, it's not going to be at the near end.

The real average distance is nearer the furthest distance than it is near the nearest distance. I expect better from El Reg. ;) Actually, Wikipedia commits the same grievous error.

>>Is this an average? as I thought the Earth's orbit was elliptical?

It's an average. The Earth is around 152 x 10^6m away at its furthest (aphelion) and around 147 x 10^6m at it's nearest (perihelion).

I think it's actually a bad average - they've just added to the two together and divided by two. Whereas with an elliptical orbit, the average will actually be lower than the midway value, I think. I.e. more of its time is going to be lower than the 'add both and divide by two' value than over it. The Earth does not move back and forth along a fixed line perpendicular the Sun. It moves in an elliptical path with the sun offset from the centre.

But I don't have time to work it out properly right now so yes, average. ;)