Posts by h4rm0ny

Re: Is El Reg the new Slashdot?

Well as someone who generally likes the new stuff from Microsoft, I can give you countless examples of where simple factual corrections from me have been modded down heavily. Time and time again. Respectfully, if you think that Linux has as bias against it here as Windows, then I think you should try to conciously be more neutral for a week and see what you can spot against Windows. As a heavy user of both Linux and Windows, I am very sensitive to FUD against both, and I promise you I deal with a lot more directed against Windows than I do against Linux. Regarding the motivations of the downvoters, you say Linux users. I would more specifically say Andoid fans in general.

Re: Modern Scam they should call it instead...

"The number of clicks might be the same, but I bet scrolling through page after page of initially-unordered non-hierarchical tiles might take up a wee bit more time. You know, they put directories in MS-DOS 2.0 for a reason..."

No, there's very slittle scrolling through pages. I regularly use around twenty programs on Windows. That many tiles fits on my laptop screen even without have to reduce the double width tiles. On my 24" monitor on my desktop (where I actually use the twenty programs), it can put fifty tiles on there which is way more than I need so I don't have to scroll. Only very rarely do I need to expand out to the All Applications view and if I find I need to do that more than a couple of times for a program, I just pull it onto the main screen. In fact, the All Applications view isn't reached by "scrolling" which makes me wonder if you've actually used this.

Re: Is El Reg the new Slashdot?

"The DIFFERENCE would be that no-one is paying them"

I'm not being paid to post here either. I doubt any of the other people you consider to be "Microsoft Shills" are being paid to post.

Re: Is El Reg the new Slashdot?

"Mostly it's ignorant people but some of it is malicious - so don't whinge on about Windows getting a hard time - it all depends where you're standing."

The correct position, imo, is not to balance ignorant bias against one OS with ignorant bias against another OS, but to balance it with informative posts regardless of direction. The factionalism on these forums is insane. I know that I have corrected misinformation about Linux on several occasions, but I know that I far more often have to do it with Windows on these forums (and I have been modded down heavily on occasion even just for factual corrections when it comes to Windows.)

Your comment about someone "whinging on about Windows getting a hard time" is unfair, imo. Windows *does* get a much harder time here than other OS. It's a pathological hatred for many to the point that they appear to get genuinely angry at facts that undermine criticism. If you're against FUD, you should be against all of it. I.e. don't call someone "whinging" if they object to it just because it's FUD against a non-prefered OS. It's as much a valid complaint as when we get RICHTO here launching partisan attacks against Linux (and you'll find a number of posts from me correcting their slanders as well).

Re: Darwin prize - yes a repost but but I need to say it again..

"Well, obviously it looks like you have a requirement for a more traditional Desktop...

Me: That you disabled in the last Win8 release

Him: ........

"

I am literally using the Desktop in the latest release of Win8 right now.

"Don't forget that Microsoft comes up with new GUI toolkits about every 3 years. I would guess that Modern won't survive the test of time either, and after that the name will just sound silly."

Because we all find the term 'Modern Art' so confusing after forty years of it. ;)

Re: Modern Scam they should call it instead...

"Microsoft is going to see that reality is not their fantasy on crack at all. They seriously believe to be able to sell to everyone and force everyone to use such an unproductive childish interface"

I've actually done counts on the number of clicks and mouse movements I need to accomplish the same things in Windows 8 as in Windows 7. A few things take longer (turning on a VPN is an extra two clicks). More things are quicker. A lot of it is the same. So I see no evidence that it is "unproductive" As to "childish", I can only guess that you see large, easy to click on and read icons childish. That's a matter of taste but it's not any usability problem. Don't you think that calling for "tonnes of people" to be fired is a bit extreme? Is El Reg the new Slashdot?

Re: Find content from legitimate sources...

"If the f*cking copyright holders want people to go for legit sources, don't f*cking region code! Simple as that!"

So should the BBC not be putting any of their content online, or should we British be subsidizing the entire rest of the world with our licence fees?

Re: Hang on!

"Or are people convinced that Facebook and Google ARE the Internet?"

I think they are. I had a family member round last week using their laptop once. They opened Firefox, it defaulted to that Firefox Google home page and they'd type, e.g. Hotmail into it and then click on the resulting link. When they wanted to go somewhere else, they'd type Google into the address bar and when it came up they'd type the name of the next site they wanted into Google (e.g. BBC iplayer) and click on the resulting link. Every time. Never mind that all these things were in their address history and would come up the moment you typed a few bits of the name into it.

Re: Google to alter search results to hide PIRATES

"I honestly think this move will benefit people who do want to violate IP. Google was shining a light on it in such a way it made it easy for people with the IT skills of politicians to see how many sites were offering copyright infringing content."

If all else is equal, that will probably be true. But it does change how easy it is to find new sources of pirated material. If copyright owners can shut sites down fast enough, hiding their replacements will slow uptake of the new sources. The more piracy requires special effort or a knowledge of where to go to get the material, the more it will be reduced.

I'm actually surprised by Google for this, but good for them for doing something.

Re: So

"Far too much confusion for the average joe to deal with. EPIC FAIL"

The "average joe" typically doesn't think much about different GUIs or APIs and they especially don't spend a lot of time thinking "the name of this OS overlaps with the name of this API, I'm so confused.". They just grab a program, install it and expect it to run. Which it will because Win8 is backwards compatible with Windows 7.

Re: Finally it's official!

"The Windows 8 user interface isn't very usable on desktops."

I have been using it fine on my multi-monitor Desktop set up for the past month. I've had very little trouble. I've checked how many keystrokes and mouse clicks it takes to do something in Windows 8 as it does to do in Windows 7. A few rare instances take longer, e.g. starting a VPN (two extra clicks), more take less and most are around the same as I'm accustomed to just hitting the Windows Key and typing the first character or two of the program I want to launch which is the same on both.

My Start screen easily holds about fifty different default programmes which is far more than even I need, so that's actually better. A hierarchical menu is not the best approach when you have space for all the things you'd want at the top level and an easy way of identifying which are which (colours, images, etc.).

Why are some so determined to hate? If you can objectively show that it takes the same or fewer clicks to do something on average, what is the problem?

Re: Do other than sales and marketing types use Office?

"Yet more from you? Obvious Microsoft shill. Do fuck off and let us enjoy our moaning that something else is about to be monetized."

Sorry. My bad.

Re: Do other than sales and marketing types use Office?

Yes. Most of the corporate world uses Office. You can do a huge amount more with Office than you can with Google Apps, both in terms of pure functionality and in terms of locking down data, rolling it out and maintaining it.

Particularly those that do not want to hand all their data over to a company that has a business model based around data mining and selling you to advertisers. Take a look at the file permissions system in Server 2012. It's not exclusive to Office, but it will give you an idea of the sort of thing that appeals to many big businesses in having an MS infrastructure. You can DRM files to be accessible only by certain machines, user accounts, geographical locations or when on a particular VPN. It can even run regular expressions on documents so that any spreadsheet with a Social Security Number or a document with a particular keyword gets automatically locked down. And that integrates with SharePoint which integrates with Office 2013. I'm not really an expert in Office - there are a lot of other use-cases - but this is one that I care about which would not be possible so far as I know with Google Apps. (aside from my preferring the interface in Office 2013).

Re: web applications that are hosted within Word, Excel, and the other Office component,

"What could possibly go wrong?"

Less than it used to. Would you rather great chunks of dubious third-party VBA code that have wide-ranging access running under your user account, or would you prefer sand-boxed plug-in web-applications that observe things like the same-origin policy, have a unified approach to installing and uninstalling all apps, no ability (or need) to install or modify DLLs, managed interaction with the user's UI rather than throwing up Modal windows wherever it wants. In fact, a unified GUI system for all applications based on HTML5 and JQuery. It's nice stuff. Even isolated for performance purposes so that it can't just run away with your system resources anymore. Seriously, the neophobia around here is getting out of control.

Re: The era of commercialisation hath begun...

"I mean; Office 2010. I fire up Word, and I want to start a new document, say a contract. I simply select new document, go to the templates section and from there I can search a whole collection of templates straight from office.com"

I'm not sure how you're finding that to be different in Office 2013. I have the preview running on Windows 8 and the first thing that happens when I start Word is I get a large page of templates with big colourful previews so I can see what they look like. On the left is a list of my recent documents and a link to browse for other documents. Additionally, along the top is a search box to search through online templates and a menu offering further categories such as Letters, Labels, Cards...

So it sounds like you actually still have everything you just asked about right on the opening screen for Word. None of this has suddenly shifted to being a pay model in Office 2013.

"I hope we do realize the risk here... Its not unimaginable that Microsoft will simply provide less software and features themselves, and let the gaps be filled in by (paying!) 3rd parties. So effectively getting customers to pay more while they actually get less."

That may happen, but the point is that there is no evidence of it and no change toward it in 2013. The introduction of an Office store is a good thing. Firstly, it provides a central way for makers of Office plugins to market and sell their goods, encouraging developers to produce them, especially small developers who would struggle to self-market and sell add-ons and greater ability to know they wont get ripped off. Secondly, it provides greater security for us the user because we have a central system where we can see add-ons are signed and see reviews on it, we can be sure if it is updated we know about and get that update, we can search for what we need in a central place. Basically, win-win for developers and users.

Re: Hold fire on the hate....

I linked to the drafts below - you sound like someone who will understand the details in them. But I think anyone with a reasonably good IT background can get a feel from both of them. Compare equivalent snippets of the security handling between the two documents:

Draft X

interface CertificateInformation {

static CertificateInformation getLocalCertificate ();

readonly attribute ArrayBuffer certificate;

readonly attribute DOMString subject;

readonly attribute CertificateFingerprints fingerprint;

};

dictionary SrtpSecurityDescription {

DOMString encrypt = "AES-CM";

boolean encryptRtp = true;

boolean encryptRtcp = true;

unsigned short keystreamPrefix = 0;

DOMString authenticate = "HMAC-SHA1";

unsigned short n_a = 160;

unsigned short n_tag = 80;

DOMString keyDerivation = "AES-CM";

unsigned long keyDerivationInterval = 0;

ArrayBuffer key;

ArrayBuffer salt;

unsigned long? windowSizeHint;

unsigned long long rtpPacketCount = 281474976710656;

unsigned long long rtcpPacketCount = 2147483648;

ArrayBuffer? mki;

};

Applications that establish peer-to-peer transports require that the IP addresses of a peer are signaled to the remote peer. This can pose a privacy exposure even though an IP address can only be loosely correlated with a person. For instance, it is possible to use IP addresses to determine the physical location of a person.

In some applications, establishing a peer-to-peer transport occurs prior to establishing user consent for the session. This can be necessary to remove the delays associated with transport setup that might otherwise occur after session acceptance. Exposing IP address information prior to acceptance provides the initiator of the session a way to collect the IP address of even an unwilling peer.

Applications are encouraged to only signal relay ports prior to gaining explicit consent from users.

End Draft X

Draft Y

To Do: Discuss privacy aspects of this from a finger printing point of view - it's probably around as bad as access to a canvas :-)

End Draft Y

The second one simply doesn't have a lot of what the first example has. It shuffles the whole area off elsewhere as far as I can see - and holes in a specification lead to fragmentation.

Re: Daleks?

No - it's a bad thing. I liked the big colourful Daleks.

But apparently the decision was more to do with budget than anything else. Personally I'm just saddened to see them back. I like the Daleks, but under RTD they just got silly. One Dalek was a deadly threat. Then you got five Daleks and they were more easily dealt with. Then you got hundreds of Daleks and they were barely a threat. Then you got millions of Daleks and they were dispatched by the thousand. The more Daleks you got, the less deadly they became.

I'll retract my opinion if they actually become scary again, but I fear more RTD-style "Daleks are scary because I tell you they are, even though they never achieve anything".

Re: They're going to cost too much

"So I think Microsoft could be in trouble. The high end tablet is desirable but too expensive. The low end tablet is gimped and probably expensive too."

I'm probably going to buy one (you can probably guess that from my enthusiastic posts ;), but I've been putting off buying a new machine for a while (trying to land on the right side of the next technology push). If you consider it more costly than it is worth for you, it may still be a good thing because it will almost certainly encourage other manufacturers to produce similar machines that are cheaper. I think MS are making this as a reference machine for others to follow.

Re: Whilst one can of course have various opinions about both the new os and............

Acer have the most to worry about. You don't see Toshiba or Lenovo getting all panicky about a new entrant to the market.

Re: "we may sell a few million, I don't know how many"

"Dear God Almighty. A multi-billion dollar corporate CEO actually dares to come out with a statement like that? Can you ever imagine Gates, Jobs or anyone else saying such a crass thing?"

Sounds pretty much perfect as a threat, to be honest. If the other manufacturers don't start producing better quality products, they'll just order another million. And they'll keep doing it until better quality hardware for Win8 appears. In this scenario you don't want to give a hard number, you want to keep it open ended as all good threats should be.

Re: Let them riot

The following quote from Acer made me laugh: "It is not something you are good at, so please think twice"

Acer wouldn't object if the Surface was a worse product than their own. They're more concerned about it being better. Statements from MS about "we might sell a few million" and that they'll only be selling them directly, not through the "channel" begin to point more strongly toward the Surface being a tool to make manufacturers up their game, rather than an actual plan to enter the hardware market in a large capacity. I'm well in favour of that - if MS can get the others to up their game, that's a great thing, imo.

Re: I must of missed

"If women want to work in IT there is nothing stopping them and if there is and it is nothing to do with ability to do the job then that needs to be addressed "

There is certainly something. The farther East you go (India, Eastern Europe), the more sex ratios in IT balance out. In India, programmers are apparently around 50:50 in balance of the sexes. Which pretty much rules out biological differences and puts the blame on culture.