Posts by Paul Shirley 2284 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
You have to wonder whether management and regulators were fully aware that children wouldn't understand any of it, or so detached from reality they couldn't understand the innuendo either ;)
Both are believable.
I remember not liking Rainbow as a youngster and refusing to watch it. Eternally grateful to the mates that reintroduced me to it as a student when i was old enough to understand.
Not long since the tablet market was reported to be saturated and in a serious slowdown. In 6 months we'll know if this is just a new product launch temporary increase or not, how many (or few) devices were actually sold and whether everyone that wanted a surface bought one early and sales grind to a halt.
With the current crop of win10 tablets almost at giveaway prices and still barely selling I'm suspicious about this being more than a launch blip.
Reliable 128Gb USB3 sticks are as little as £24 right now. Despite Microsoft's best efforts to bloat my C drive with visual studio etc. I can still squeeze a couple of full drive images on mine.
The data drives are more of a problem and the cloud is far too slow to ever upload them to even if i had enough tb's available. Big backup drives and a firesafe are here for some more years.
It's only ever been claimed to be a quantum annealing device. The debate has been whether it's actually performing the quantum part or just performing "unsimulated" annealling on an analogue computer. Both should be faster than simulated annealling, maybe this confirms the quantum part, which i believe refers only to quantum tunneling effects.
It still doesnt answer the question: is it faster than the best classical algorithm because the test the picked was a guaranteed win if it works at all.
@Naseus: "There's some incredible Windows laptops available if you go to an actual PC retailer as opposed to the same shop which sells junk DVDs for three quid a go."
PC's are commodity items, even the supposed 'actual PC retailers' are selling the same crap as Walmart, just charging more for it and offering a few different cosmetic options. And it's not really a problem for buyers because they get the job done, at the cost of further supporting the Windows monopoly. Just grabbing a new laptop of a supermarket shelf is the normal way to buy now.
After counting ordinary buyers, direct corporate bulk orders (for even lower spec Windows machines) and Apple feeding off the rich few %, the few of us actually dealing with specialist suppliers or caring about the spec or OS are just noise in the stats.
@Ledswinger it's not so long since ms liked the idea of a desktop dumbed down to act like a phone, which would have made it much easier for them running the same abbreviated apps everywhere. They're pushing full fat to phones only because that plan didn't work! I'll be sticking with the right os for each device for the foreseeable future, not whatcsuits the os writers plans.
Useful as competition is, you can't force users to accept 2nd rate products based on it. Yes competition would be nice but Microsoft don't have a competitive product and apple aren't even trying to compete for the mass market.
Time to look elsewhere, probably to internal competition in the Android market and that's likely to need a hefty nudge from regulators. Luckily it's now close enough to a monopoly to get that, but regulation still can't force users to say no to Google's desirable products, just open the door to alternatives on Android.
This argument is over, the world chose Android, that's where competition needs to work from now on.
Been saying for years the only safe mobile device is one with nothing worth losing on it. They're physically insecure and you can't guarantee they won't be snatched while unlocked even if normally secured. Very few people will accept the disruptive level of lockdown needed to fix that so it's not going to change, convenience over safety seems to be the norm.
Failed connections
Dropped connections
Crosstalk with other calls (how the fsck is that even possible, yet it happens)
Weekly app improvements that improve ad delivery but rarely anything else.
...and top of range pricing for pstn calling!
If the question was "how do we make calling buggier" Skype is the answer ;)
Even on the PC some had been using GEM for 9 months, many more using it on Atari ST and I believe the Amiga was shipping as well. I'd already grown to hate the original Macintosh GUI before any of that.
As usual Microsoft were last to the party but somehow manage to get fans believing they were first.
When Google finally listened and let me delete my unloved G+ account they forgot to point out i was also removing the ability to comment in the app store. Something that should be bound to my store account and only it.
If Google are listening they are learning from Microsoft how to mishear what's being said and misrepresent the response. Seems whatever it mutated into G+ is still being forced on users who want other unrelated services.
...you missed the bit where the contractor is his own agent, hiding behind a company. The whole scheme is about NOT paying wages so nothing would change, said company owning contractor would carry on relabelling his earnings as lower taxed company dividends.
To work there has to be a new employer-employee relationship somewhere that can be taxed and that has to be your end client as the employer because your agent (youselft) has no reason to pay you more than minimum wage as an employee.
Claiiming it can't work because browser code is branch heavy? To me that suggests frequent queue flushes and more memory bandwidth wasted on abandonned op fetches. Reducing the waste with shorter prefetch seems worth trying and i doubt they bothered licencing till benchmarking showed a real improvement.
However counterintuitive it seems to you, trying to second guess the complex interactions at this level is more magic than science and you'll always be surprised, however long you do it.
Yep, it's been repeatedly reported that most of them get shoved in a draw and forgotten.
When I'm boiling water I know how many mugs of coffee I'm making and fill appropriately. My PVR's are left in standby because I'd prefer them to record things and so on. We're good at killing lights. I can't think of a single device in my home a meter would help put in a lower power state while still being worth using. Completely pointless.
I thought it was obvious: they ignored everyone not named Ballmer. Including their own staff.
Now they're mostly ignoring anyone not named Nadella.
Someday they'll give up delivering what Microsoft needs and build what customers want. We're still a few years and another CEO away from that.
Seems unlikely anyone would buy an fx9590 without knowing more than an average buyer. Beyond checking it fire his mboard this co has insane power and cooling requirement's, far beyond what many board can support. Beyond the PSU in typical consumer PCs. He admits visiting amd.com presumably for research. His case will likely fail on the basis he should have known exactly what he was buying having done research. It's not much of a secret how the fx series use core pairs or the performance problems that causes.
There's something very fishy going on. Is he really just suffering buyers remorse after *not* properly researching the purchase?
If you want to go down that rabbit hole things will get very messy. AMD did mightily screw up it's design and modules typically perform like 1.5 real cores but do manage to issue multiple instructions per clock. The problem is more that those ops then get stalled waiting on the shared execution units.
If his argument is 8 simulations ops case over and no cpu guarantees to always achieve it anyway.
Not really. PC's have extremely diverse hardware, rampant competition for component use and from day1 had user accessible expansion support. Of necessity PC's evolved to have decoupled subsystems in both hardware and software that make fine grained patching a required feature and long term interface stability expected. Windows got most of it's early start by supporting more of those variants than other OSs.
Mobile started as black boxes and largely remain that way today, with precious little cooperation beyond the SIM interface and comms standards and proprietary driver support locked behind NDAs. Enough of the driver support is locked away in opaque blobs that we're utterly dependent on OEMs to support them, made worse by Google persistently breaking kernel API compatibility.
There's simply not enough evolutionary pressure on suppliers to support their black box devices. Even non stop security scares haven't managed it.
It's about reducing weight rather than increasing total storage. Removing metals from one electrode shouldn't make much difference to volume but shave off a lot of weight.
This is unlikely to end up in your phone where volume is the constraint, for a car that's a lot of mass not being hauled around. The battery efficiency may be no better than Li-ion but it's energy will be used more efficiently.
"Firefox has telemetry"
...that actually turns off when you tell it to. Unlike the hour I wasted last night trying to find out why Win10 was burning an entire core (and keeping the rest of the CPU turbo clocked) handling CEIP related crap, on a machine with CEIP disabled and I'm fairly certain uninstalled. Win10 had magically 'forgotten' to uninstall InvAgent.dll and left more triggers to launch it than I could find.
And if this happens to you: what finally killed it was taking ownership of system32\invagent.dll and renaming it. You can kill the obvious Task Scheduler hooks but it wasn't enough to kill this bastard.
I want aware of firefox even being able to monitor my desktop searches, application launches, system settings, used data or much of anything I don't volunteer, let alone report then to the mothership. Neither does my mail software. The malware known as win10 however...
I didn't buy copies of windows sold as subsidised by advertising and at no point have i willingly opted into receiving it (more accurately I've not knowingly failed to opt out of it). There is no possible interpretation of my deal with Microsoft where this is "legitimate advertising" even if they stuck to just letting me know the upgrade is available.
My major problem is how many of the Android changes are capricious, cryptic change for changes sake. I don't need navigation buttons that change radically with every major release, button layouts that swap order, ui features suddenly hidden behind swiping gestures or behind dodgy icons that mean nothing to me. Yet that's what this idiot did with every release.
Worst of all he's inspired ms to believe they can just ignore customers and do whatever they like with no thought of maintaining consistency. It seems Microsoft are never done trying to copy Google's mistakes.
My lg's allow alphabetic, install date and manual ordering but not by usage. But that makes sense because you pin frequent apps to the home screens in Android instead of launching from the app draw.
Trying to find things in a randomised sort order seems like a poor idea anyway, much like most of Microsoft ui thinking of late.
A little surprised there are relatively few obvious fake reviews on the store page, not what i expect from Microsoft. Even more surprised people actually want a feature list inferior to most devices default launcher. But I'm still perpetually surprised that people like ios ripoff launchers, with all the apps dumped on the home screen and bugger all organisation options so what do i know!
Left wondering why ms bothered making such an unambitious launcher, with a promised feature list that would degrade the quality of any of my current devices.
The craft brewers association defines craft partly on how many pints it's largest member currently produces, with headspace for growth. 6mil now, it will grow to fit however large and bloated it's members get. The significant thing that actually affects quality is the insistence on source to consumer temperature control. The problem is that doesn't stop Coors, Miller or Bud delivering perfectly cooked crap everywhere, it's a minimum quality limit. A very low limit.
The most common definition of craft beer is: £1 more per pint
Most 'craft' brewers aim for more, sometimes £1 per third pint. The points that just try to be great beer are desperately trying to take the name back to just mean good beer, real or keg. We live in sad times when the marketing is more important than the product.
(A colleague with Brewdog shares and discounts can barely justify even the discounted prices!)
I think the public are sophisticated enough to stick with what works for them, while Google delivers better results on average they'll hold their customers, not because the customers are lazy or unsophisticated but because they're making logical and proper choices.
There's a strong element of 'we know better than the public' on display. While that's the foundation for resisting monopolies and the public's willingness to sell their own choice to the them, it can go too far. Listening to Microsoft sponsored lobbying is not helping them make the right decisions.
I strongly suspect the best policy the EU could come up with would (and should) disappoint *everyone* - the mythical level playing field no one lobbying actually wants. They should be looking at what delivers the least harm to users and nothing else.
Right now not having Foundem pop up in search is doing me no harm at all and not having dozens of 2ndary search engines fill the top search results was an improvement I want to see continued.
That's likely to be a long wait. The whole win10 everywhere idea is misguided. With the (half hearted) attempts to make win10 more desktop friendly it's heading in the wrong direction for small screens. With the repeat of "burning platform" hinted at winphone as a real mobile os isn't likely to be resurrected.
Microsoft would need to ship phablets to make win10 a sensible mobile os. Not going to happen while Surface exists, Ballmer might have accepted cannibalising ms product lines, saner minds are in charge now. Not much saner though. Ballmer would have spent more years pushing a failed product, todays ms are more ruthless and pragmatic. If wp looks neglected there's nothing accidental about that.
They did finally add the 'run as admin' options to the context and start menu but its still a pia having to remember to do it for apps that dont ask for elevation. There are enough of them to be annoying and most fail silently to add a sense of adventure to the game. I have no idea how ordinary users ever get their systems configured... Apart from calling us!
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
