Posts by Paul Shirley 2284 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
Couple of years ago I spent a week using a dual Xeon PC, lots of cores (12?). Then I had to go home and watch my 6 core Phenom 1100T chew through massive C++ compile jobs at less than half the speed - despite clocking >1GHz higher. Very nice compile engines.
An i7 with that many cores has me eyeing the bank balance... even with Intel price gouging.
Sadly that's not my experience of win 8 or 10. Nothing ever send to get fixed without causing as much breakage somewhere else in the os. Some of it by design, perpetually trying to update my driver's to newer versions bit me again yesterday, when i came home to a network pvr with half it's tuners non functional. Whatever forced update took the machine down yesterday replaced the functional ones with broken versions I'd hidden to stop that happening. The cnuts are now ignoring my settings whenever it takes their fancy.
Wiping all my firewall settings was pretty catastrophic on a network service. Couldn't vpn into to it to fix the mess or access any pvr functions. Microsoft damn near bricked it.
Expecting things to magically get better on windows is misguided, they just shuffle where the bugs are from time to time.
Very iffy. After serial failure since win95, win10 finally has nearly working sleep on my current desktop. It's a bit too fond of spontaneously waking, occasionally decides not to wake, frequently forgets where the network is and OpenVPN never survives. But it sort of works. Even my old laptop was picky about restarting from sleep on xp.
The retired desktop my wife uses never had working sleep till I put kubuntu on it...
The pc running as a network pvr lost sleep mode with the Win8 to 10 upgrade. Not unexpected since every windows update breaks something.
Iffy is being generous. Fusterclucked.
Also worth remembering Android has plenty of internal competition, with every manufacturer trying to stamp their own ideas on it's UI, built in apps and hardware (something the Android haters also tend to bundle into the 'fragmentation' theme). Then throw in all the tweaks, hacks, apps and firmware hackers independent developers create.
Much of Android's evolution is driven by Google plucking out the best ideas from that sea of experiments. Most of the 'new' ideas in WP were being tried somewhere on Android before Microsoft 'inventet' them. Most failed.
Microsoft have generously provided a pop-up just before the scheduled update starts. You'll have 30min to work out which option actually cancels and this time the X will follow guidelines and cancel the cancel option. For added convenience they'll leave the scheduled time just when you expect it, while you're soundly asleep between 4 and 5 am. Don't worry, the pc will wake up for it, even if they have to hack your settings and BIOS.
Have I said ”cnuts” yet?
Only part true. Hard to agree MS had any beneficial effect on the quality of the hardware, that's all Nokia. They did indeed provide a shippable OS where Nokia had dithered and failed to complete multiple attempts themselves. But shippable & good/desirable aren't the same and you need willing buyers as well as a shipping product.
More telling, neither iOS or Android appear to have done anything in reaction to WP. No OS features copied, no attempt to compete with the hardware (though only Nokias cameras stand out on the WP side), I'm not sure either have even run any PR against the lame duck.
Oracle flat out refused to licence full strength Java for mobile, insisting on crippled J2ME. Their own actions excluded Oracle from licensing in the smartphone market, where J2ME is totally unsuitable.
You can't lose licensing income in a market you're refusing to take part in.
Microturbines were pushed hard for a few years but failed because they don't work well enough to cover their installation and maintenance costs in domestic settings. The larger commercial ones sitting on a few larger buildings locally suffered the same fate and were all locked of almost immediately to avoid maintenance costs.
An 8% pv installation would need to cover most of the surface of my city house to generate enough electricity. Labour costs mean it would never pay for itself. Until someone thinks up a way to spray pv on its not a good enough solution for most available locations.
"or at least free of intrusive ads, and then split the revenue 70:30 with publishers."
So, they intend to take the lions share of the revenue and still retain the option to show me ads? Not happening. I might be interested in a non profit middleman service that passed almost all the revenue on, policed the publishers compliance and did NOTHING more.
For profit middlemen would quickly fall to the same pressures that created this cesspit while sucking value out of the system. The internet doesn't need more layers of leeches between us and content.
Back in the 80's I had to patch a C64 game for the US, which amounted to changing 1 byte in the file. After a week the US office couldn't get it done using faxed instructions and they hauled me down to London to talk them through patching. They still couldn't get it working. That's when they decided I was going to the US to patch that single byte...
Luckily they eventually found someone with a clue a few days later and many weeks before my passport would have arrived ;)
With the classic start menu it didn't really matter if overenthusiastic installers injected extra crap, it was easy to delete them, easy to move them and a multilevel tree has vastly more space to hold them anyway. You always felt you were in control of it and you never had to search tediously through an endless flat list.
That's win8/10 for you, no control over and no help from the ui.
By the time I'd bludgeoned win10 into submission after the update I didn't have the energy to complain. Before that I didn't have a net connection to complain with, the fscking update careful corrupted my network settings and I couldn't even ping the router. When Microsoft break a system they do it thoroughly.
And I think we can assume one of those tweaks will be yet another hijack of my associations/default apps, the desktop will resprout the duplicate drive folders I'm sick of hacking out of the registry and random crap will be sprayed over random settings while it replaces good drivers with bad.
Just like last weeks Windoze update did :(
It's not a closed system. If it was it would need to either convert 100% of input energy to momentum, have perfect lossless mirrors and tiny/zero input energy or melt. None of those is happening so waste energy must be leaving the drive. The em drive may just be an extremely inefficient photon rocket and simply aiming a laser into space would do a better job.
Propellent free, maybe.. New physics, unlikely.
I think they probably do have the majority of that market but it's not a high margin one. That's AMDs ongoing problem, they can't put together compelling high margin products. Even in the performance market the performance deficit is so marked they're forced to compete on price. Unlike other AMD diehards I'm not expecting Zen to fix that :(
What many Reg commenters persistently forget is the general public don't have a rabid hatred of Google, they actually like the apps and plumbing so many here have problems with. Years of using AOSP ROMS made it clear very few CyanogenMod etc. users are doing it to escape Google. What they're escaping is the clutching hand of the phone OEMs and carrier customisation.
It's easy to forget the liberties carriers took with phones before Android and regaining that control would be a disaster for users. This EU complaint is misdirected if the reward is simply a choice of which blend of crapware your device ships with. If action leads to anything more than compulsory windows style ballot screens on app use (something Android has already built in BTW) power will shift firmly from users to suppliers and not in a beneficial way for users.
What the actual complainants are fighting for is the right to fsck up your phone before you even see it. Google did pretty well with nearly stock Android while they owned Motorola, it's not obvious they need the phone businesses help any longer.
If Google decided to follow Apple into large scale mobile manufacturing and refuse to licence anything to competitors, I wonder what the EU reaction would be? Massively disruptive but completely moving them outside the scope of this action. Would they like the result, a monopoly where only Apple and China get to compete at all and no EU oem receives any share of Android income?
GPs regularly prescribe inappropriate and useless treatments to pushy patients demanding treatment rather than wasting time convincing them that, for example, antibiotics won't help their cold. They frequently don't know if treatments prescribed in good faith actually work. Prescription rates are a terrible way to assess efficacy.
Such a pity we can't trust them to use this data to solve that problem.
@DougS: they do it because a real quantum annealer could be a genuine improvement. Problem is D-Wave keep demonstrating significant speed improvements over classical implementations only to see the classical version improved to beat them, usually on hardware at 1% of the cost.
At some point they'll either put together enough usable qbits to beat classical hardware on speed, cost or both. OR they'll hit a noise wall and fall out of the race. We're a long way from finding out which.
The unqualified use of 'quantum computer' plays on expectations of what the device actually does. 'Adiabatic quantum annealer' risks too many noticing it's not a general purpose quantum logic device, which is what most tend to think 'quantum computer' means.
A quantum annealer would be a useful device in theory for the problems it can solve, there's little evidence it's actually any faster in real life so far.
99% of home Windows users didn't consciously buy Windows, they bought a cheap PC with 'free' Windows install. In some cases an actually free install like my £120 PC running as a pvr on its "Win8 with Bing" freebie OS.
The only conscious choice they made was the path of least resistance and falling in with the MS monopoly and that's what worries Microsoft as they stop needing PCs MS loses those hidden sales.
Think I'll stick to cygwin for those odd times I need linux tools in Windows - can interact directly with Windows (and 'top' works). For anything more extreme I'll just boot Linux or use a VM. Bit of a strange frankensteined beast more about keeping you in Windows than doing useful stuff.
My Twiiter is full of rugby news, commentaries, photos and videos. Most of the many pubs I spread my time between post their beer lists and events, I even get Belgian beer and bar news on it.
In many ways it's targeted advertising done nearly right, opt in, fine grained and correctly targeted. If Twitter could work out how to monetise that without drowning us in traditional advertising they'd have a business model, sadly they're well on the way to annoying ad overload instead.
There also a tiny amount of 'gossip' and keeping in touch with family & friends when emails too much effort. A tiny amount but I'm long past my thirties ;)
Brother abandoned his laptop for a Samsung tablet, wifes parents couldn't give away theirs when they started using iPads exclusively. Niece needs a pc for degree work but uses her phone for everything else.
The death of the pc in consumer land is further along than many of us want to believe, an optional extra not necessity. Microsoft didn't shit on their own product without reason, the market changed, it's the implementation they got wrong.
Today's ransomware explosion can't explain the 2013 study unless you generalise to say Android simply isn't a valuable enough malware target in general. I think most owners simply don't put anything they worry about losing on them and the Google cloud let's them restore enough to not care about resets.
I know the piece was pitifully short on detail but maybe you should go find out how this actually works (for the week it has left to live). No dependency on them to build his site, shims they wrote supplying an external service that's nice to be part of but far from essential in any way. An offer the top 'service' very easy to just ignore it they continue down this path.
... SCO declared bankruptcy, that protects them from most attempts at debt recovery. Neither the bk judge or trustee seem interested in letting them be squashed.
Also: the only remaining asset is the lawsuit, it's more important to IBM to win that than simply close it down
>pimped Amiga
It was a pity they went bk before the 3dfx powered pods and games shipped. The last prototype headset I played with was smaller and more comfortable than any of the new offerings, sadly also uncompleted.
Sadly several decades on Moore's law still hasn't quite got us to 'finished' hardware at an affordable price.
Unfair to complain about the wearing over specs comment, far too many of us wear them and it was a serious pia the 1st time round with VR in the 90s. I want a solution for that before diving into VR again.
Also worth noting that every vr device available to preorder recently sold out nearly instantly. Even the lacklustre Rift ;) Just have to hope they don't kill VR all over again with poor launch products.
I think it was covered by the continuing begging to stop trying so hard to unify the UI across all devices. The tablet folk are suffering from Microsoft's necessary retreat from Metro's damage to the desktop, just like the desk folk suffered before then.
Microsoft are still minded to see how much they can get away with annoying users with ill judged compromises in the UI. ATM they're on a drunken walk, randomly annoying every part of the market in turn. Feedback is telling them there isn't a single converged user base yet they carry on pretending there is and all it wants is a converged product, whatever the cost.
I'll concede Microsoft are listening a lot more than before. They still aren't hearing very much and mostly only acting on what they want to hear, compounded by the insider programme having a strong bias towards being a cheerleading camp. Whatever design damage insider is doing was and is being orchestrated by Microsoft.
Ordinary users are being constantly spied on, to find out how imposed changes are working but not actually being listened to. Not quite "take it or leave it", more working out how to discourage patterns Microsoft don't want. Ultimately this whole mess (and Win8 before it) is Microsoft putting their narrow business interests above customer needs and they still have the monopoly power to dictate to users.
Andrew is also somewhat wrong about the quality of Win10. I'm mightily pissed off with updates hijacking my file associations several times a year, with it installing known bad drivers, rebooting my network pvr server at will (and crashing doing it), still needing 3rd party hacks to its ui and the endless battle to find compatibility settings for so many apps. It's still a mess with fairly minor core improvements.
...said library call would be compiled into your local image, not yanked in from a remote site in most languages. However I'm not aware of many languages supporting standard libs with a leftpad function so you'd actually write your own, inline that 1 liner function or embed it in higher level string formatting.
A good restore process can't help you if the data's not there and it's only there if you've considered the backup process and strategy. I want to know if restore works, if it's fast and easy. I want to know that and a whole lot more about the backup side of it because it's ultimately about the data, not the software.
Which still wouldn't explain having just 2 restore points available. Either the laptop didn't have any changes for 30 odd days or the 'backups' didn't happen for that long. Or maybe the service is just broken.
Either way flushing older copies from the cloud is idiotic. I nominally keep about 3 weeks worth of daily snapshots but the software doesn't delete anything unless I'm adding a new image, they shouldn't just disappear even if your product has "30 days" in the name.
"So, you only want democracy when it gives you the right answer?"
Well, it's a piss poor way to choose leaders but it would be nice to actually give it a try. What we have now isn't remotely democratic, with a choice of bad/worse/ignored and bugger all chance of actually having my views represented.
"the security services will continue to exercise those powers without the safeguards the bill intends to introduce" and it's pretty certain they'll carry on whatever laws get passed.
Outlawing snooping might not stop it, it will make the security services a lot more circumspect about how they obtain and use the results and paranoid about who they share with. Anything that reduces gov access to surveillance has to be a win. Maybe the saner voices in the securiity services could even impose some needed restraint without constant pressure from power mad ministers. Maybe.
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