Posts by Paul Shirley

It''s only a 'sweetheart deal' iff they're paying substantially less than a court would force them to. Start by showing the workings where multinationals are breaking the law.

Since no one actually believes there's any law being broken we're left with moral outrage (and in the case of politicians there's precious little morality involved) but corporate entities don't really feel shame and shareholders are free to sue them if they act on it.

I'm morally outraged that yet again politicians would rather froth & foam about a broken system their predecessors created rather than actually fix their own mistakes. It's always someone else's responsibility when politicians and gov screw up.

It's worse than that, when they finally offered me the chance to buy one last year, there was an 8 week delivery time! Had a shiny new LG G2 delivered 3 days later.

Re: I've used non isolated OS before and mistakes bite hard

Even worse is when they just spray memory but don't crash. You might not even realise your data is corrupt for a very long time and finding those bugs a nightmare.

The "actual evidence on second hand smoking" that indirectly forced the pub smoking ban was staff blood tests regularly finding high enough levels of CO to threaten health. Doesnt matter if most exposure just leaves you stinking of smoke, some of it has more serious effects.

The pub trade got lucky, they were on the brink of a flood of lawsuits when the ban preempted the issue.

Most pub users I've talked to approve the ban anyway, including the smokers, who can still appreciate better air quality. Just a pity it took health scares to force action. Politicians and business don't have the balls to ban offensive practice's, they always need some health excuse to hide behind.

Re: Commie or common sense?

... And the nationalised railways stood out as the only one of them that cared for it's customers in any meaningful way, except it was the employees on the ground doing the caring because their jobs would be hell otherwise, not management or gov policy.

There are reasons to prefer nationalised industries (if run by competent staff instead of the idiots gov keep choosing) but caring about customers has rarely been an objective.

Re: oh. him.

Sorry Lars, his firm lost 10's millions on the SCO affair.

Early in the case they bought into the scam to increase their take, later when it started falling apart they bought their way out of that by accepting a fixed fee cap to complete the case. The case isn't finished and costs exceeded the fee cap before it even reached trial.

Re: the art of zen

The problem is 40% brings them near to where Intel started 2015, won't take long for Intel to pull away again. So AMD are still relying on higher core counts and most uses/users still don't benefit from that.

I have a suitable workflow with Visual C++ and massive compile jobs keeping all cores at 100%. My 8 core FX8370 OC'd to 4.5Ghz on all cores is still 10-20% slower than the stock mid range Intel quad cores others in the team are using.

I also won't be surprised if the 40% IPC hike is rather less for single thread performance, AMD are still trying to correct the performance problems their module architecture brought.

Re: Standards

So time to get behind extending XMPP?

"Intel will just release 2 versions of their new CPU range"

? Looks more like the plan is to provide no driver or other software support for new silicon except for Win10. Which is basically no change from today, the CPU keeps working, just never notices new features.

They'll get away with neglecting legacy Windows to death. Apply it to Linux,BSD etc. and even the US regulators will reconsider breaking up Microsoft, then fining the parts till they can't afford to fsck with the market.

Re: This is a stupid move by M$

I'd quite like them to remember I paid for the Win8 copy it installed over, that had many years of support expected and expect them to treat Win8.2 as a fully paid for product. It's not a freebie.

Re: information conservation

"one and only one solution at a future specified time"

If you remove state that can only reduce the future outcomes. If that removal is deterministic then the future state is also predictable.

Yes, that breaks computing past states from today but our observed reality appears to have a preferred time direction, no one really knows why and we know the theories and math are incomplete.

And to seal the deal Windows is capable of setting permissions even admin can't override. If they aren't already using that in windows update it's just a matter of time. Luckily Linux seems not to honour that crappery on files but removing Microsoft malware from the registry can be a problem.

Re: Sign in using facebook

I signed up to the "I'm going to lie, lie, lie, semi consistently so I can remember the lies" policy. Lots of businesses think they know a lot about a fictional character I play on the net.

Re: Why keep reporting these stats

In my 'bubble' of home users most seem to have moved to Android or ios for daily use and their PC's are gathering dust between the rare uses. The students have MacBooks and iPads.

Re: oracle constrained by the GPL

The point is they can only dual licence the parts they own copyright to and they cannot revoke gpl licencing except for individual cases of infringing the gpl.

Re: "Aye, well, we had it tough -- had to compile from raw gravel"

You've not lived till you've built a new machine definition for gcc, built and debugged a cross compiler with it on DOS, written libc from scratch to avoid GPL issues and created a CD filesystem driver + tools to build the CD's, all with a few weeks experience with gcc or C... then finally got started on the actually porting PC C++ to a games console Sega abandoned shortly after!

You middle aged folk had it easy ;)

Re: Page and Worstall "moved on" in the Autumn, right?

The Dude: "Seeing the register bend over for this scam is a serious disappointment"

Remind me what the IT angle was on his sermons from the mount?

Or why, if there was some tech aspect to the sermon at all, it was acceptable for his beliefs to always override honest, accurate critical reporting? Although it was always entertaining tracking down real expert commentary when he used to spout BS about naval affairs ;)

Re: I think Steve Ballmer should shut up

MS were never in a believable position to dominate mobile because at the time they needed to act they already had a successful smart mobile product with WinCE (albeit just a big fish in a tiny pond). They were incapable of reacting quickly enough, too much invested in CE and an ongoing unwillingness to break with Windows limiting their choices.

All these years on MS remain hobbled by their fixation on building devices that support Windows and it's ecosystem before making devices that support their customers needs.

@bobgameon

"Windows 10 enterprise adoption already stands at 11%"

I think you forget we know enterprise licences come with downgrade rights (usually used) or that we noticed Microsoft booking win8 upgrade options as actually sales for as long as the law allowed.

In Microsoft's version of Hollywood accounting license sales!=adoption. Or sales.

Re: Too big to fail?

The code isn't necessarily unused, a frightening amount of it duplicates past ms errors that we poor devs had to code around or against. Bugs they can't remove without breaking an unknown number of apps.

Unix got it right by minimising the api surface into small testable chunks for small separated tools. Then Linus buggered it up into a monolithic kernel in Linux, just not quite as badly as windows.

Re: How long?

The file indexing service is already "rifling through your files" and the search service loves going to the net, it doesn't take much paranoia to see where this is going.

Re:

@jjcoolaus "seamless voice activation between all your devices"

Sounds great. Until my tablet races my phone to answer "OK Google" requests, both speaking to me in different accents (given up trying to fix that), gibbering different answers because they misheard me in sightly different ways. Sometimes with the phone sitting in a different room because it's microphone is very good.

It gets annoying real fast ;)

Re: All Win Phones or just all Nokia/Microsoft phones?

Nokia/MS devices are effectively *all shipped* WP phones, with negligible sales of anything else.

I've always believed tier 1 OEMs are building WP phones because their sealed Android patent agreements with MS either explicitly require it, or 'voluntarily' supporting WP reduces the licensing fees on Android. Without that carrot|stick I think they would all have abandonned it the moment MS got into bed with Nokia.

MS have mismanaged WP from day 1, simultaneously complacent about everyone loving whatever they threw out the door and equally complacent about their ability to force compliance on an industry they have little leverage in. Seems even with Ballmer gone the wishful (or should that be magical) thinking continues.

Re: No theory

Science is speculation, backed by sanity checking.

Yes, trying to think of any reason last weeks updates should have set desktop icons to LARGE and reset every damn explorer view preference to MS defaults. It's a PIA getting the steaming POS to remember *my choices* between reboots without MS deliberately wiping them.

And I've noticed doubled up drive entries in the navigation pane again, after fixing that last week.

Leave my settings alone Microsoft.

Re: CRF?

The catch is you can't assume unlimited buffering capacity, so the encoding rate may still be constrained by a relatively short moving window. On something like a smart TV that could be a low limit, far too little for a 10min action sequence for instance. At that point only reducing resolution or framerate will fulfil the buffering, encoding bandwidth & artefact constraints.