Posts by Paul Shirley

Re: Not sure why that was downvoted

Should Microsoft tell people to use Firefox next time there's a critical IE bug?”

Yes, if they cared about their customers more than their customers wallets.

Re: Read privacy statement

@ken Hagan... Or worried that those of us that do care won't be using the preview normally. Nothing that needs my passwords is going in the win10 vm, no browsing with account logins, I won't be running any dev tools until ms sends us non instrumented builds etc. Not going to be a lot of useful testing from my install with that!

Re: COULD BE LETHAL

@dogged: a free *UPGRADE* for an OS they're likely to abandon after <3 years? They have absolutely no option but to give Win8 users a free upgrade, or face another crippling backlash. For nearly a year there have been questions asked about whether Win9 then Win10, would be charged for or treated as Win8 service packs and the feedback has been pretty clear.

Win7 *UPGRADES* being temporarily free - that's market reality smacking them in the wallet. The $25 upgrade to Win8 didn't work well enough, they have to go cheaper. Or no one is moving off 7 till a few years after it's discontinued. By the end of that free year the market supply of Win7 licences will have dried up and the choice will be Win10 or another OS.

MS are desperate and cannot bully users they way they got used to under monkey boy.

Re: Oops, wonder how THAT got in there?!?

The us gov don't believe there are any jurisdictions outside their reach when a us company is involved. The courts haven't told them they're wrong yet. Might want to hold off trusting them till that happens.

Then decide if you really want your local authorities able to raid your data on Microsoft servers so easily.

...and so far you can still use the same 'Don't have...' way to a local login in Win10. Don't be surprised if they hide it better (or remove it completely) by launch though. They're raising the friction though, couldn't test download a Store app without handing over a Microsoft account AND give the app permission to rape it, hopefully I'll never need an app enough to actually accept that crap.

Re: Bandwidth is overrated

@voland: observation check, this comment *thread* is discussing broadband speeds/quality.

And the disturbingly common 1.5 to 2gb mobile game downloads are a painful experience over 20mbit mobile when the servers fail to keep the connection long enough for each chunk (thanks Gameloft though they aren't the only incompetents). Which is the consistency over raw speed argument of course.

Re: No point in wasting radio frequencies on TV - Just stream DVB over network

You mean like the BBC does with iPlayer right now? It's a pretty disappointing experience compared to broadcast and my PVR supplies the on demand part of the deal anyway.

Re: Sorry, but Google were uttely wrong.

Voland's right hand:"There is a mandatory freeze and do-not touch period in most institutions around Xmas."

When you can prove that cybercriminals all take xmas off that might be an argument. But rather a lot of them live in countries that don't do xmas. If a company wants to slack over a holdiday they'd better throw more resources at the job to make up lost time.

Or perhaps we could stop pretending security is a normal business activity and actually accept it's high priority.

Re: I don't get it.

A drive can go to standby when idle on a running PC. Not likely to happen if it's the OS drive. Won't power down until the PC powers down in standby standby.

Re: not standing up for the game but

"There is a very good reason why it is always online and part of that reason is security/anti-hacking."

A genuine solo game doesn't need that security or anti-hacking protection. That justification doesn't fly.

@Simon operators are more than happy to support it for foreign phones or networks, till recently they got to charge what they liked for the service and even now they charge far beyond cost. There's no way to hide profiteering in this compulsory national roaming, of course they don't want to play.

The argument against seems to be little more than the networks don't want to do it and government won't be able to compel them or have any clue about doing it right. It's a fair observation, gov IS incompetent and the networks are experts at maintaining profits by fair means or foul. Not hard to guess which will get what they want in that contest.

Re: Good gawd/ess.

From the SCO lawyers POV the case was a catastrophe. Early on BS&F were so dazzled by the amount SCO told the world it was going to win and so confident the world would pay them to go away at worst, they took a share of the case. Later they escaped and that became a fixed cap on chargeable costs, however long the case took.

Last time I saw a figure they were already estimating a $30mil loss. That was several years ago and the case was almost at a standstill by then so it wasn't likely to get much worse. But it's a big loss and along with the shockingly unprofessional work they did, it's done their reputation no good.

The IBM/Novel etc. lawyers did well though ;)

Re: VLC

I dislike the ui enough to not use vlc as my default player but it's essential for the the times mpc decides it can't play a file. In my experience mpc is at least 10x more bug ridden than vlc and has extremely poor handling of file errors and sucks more cpu. I really need to man up and drop it.

Re: The irony is

The move to simpler devices has nothing to do with Microsoft, although their complete failure to spread their OS monopoly into mobile/tablet removed one obstacle to adoption. Few ordinary people need the power of a PC for the 'work' they do on them or a huge bloated OS stack to do it. The moment tablets and phones became good enough they stopped needing an overpowered PC.

Microsoft created the whole Win8 fiasco because they realised too late they had no presence in the post-PC world and no monopoly leverage because of that. So the Windows monopoly was abused to bludgeon us into accepting the crap they threw together for mobile. Hasn't worked so well, the users they targeted had already jumped ship to IOS and Android and have no problem using multiple OSes - the right one for each device.

Re: Windows 10 who cares?

"Also often the main cause of infection isn't necessarily Windows"

But sometimes it's the anticompetitive business strategies MS so love overriding the slightest bit of common sense - like embedding crapware like IE in the OS where it could do maximum damage and gain maximum exposure. Until MS genuinely value my security above their business skullduggery Windows will remain infested.

Also a right pia to enter on touch services, the combination of inaccurate input, non availability of fast swipe input in any password box I've seen and being unable to see the result for error correction mean this makes no sense for the fastest growing password protected sector (mobile)

Re: But...

No, don't think of the children, that's all the excuse they need to legitimately invoke RIPA and spy on you for the rest of your life.

TBH though it's hard to imagine how RIPA could be abused, it's basically designed as abuse when used as intended :(

Re: fragmentation - astroturf script needs change

You can specify which build specific Android devices will receive, based on all sorts of filters. With so many devices out there it's generally easier to dump support for all into one apk though and let the runtime sort it out.

@LDS

The reality is for almost all windows users the ui is the OS, a view Microsoft reinforce by packaging the whole thing as one monolithic blob and their take it or leave it choice of ui. Few are aware of improvement in the core post win7, few need those improvements enough to care. And crucially the businesses that should care know win7 is good enough already for their users needs.

By tying the os to their ui so tightly Microsoft have tied their future to the ui. And the win 8 ui stinks.

Re: Get a grip

If you dont understand the problem try not to comment.

I think it would be more accurate to say they were trying to unify the look&feel of the 3 OS products in the Ballmer era, letting the poor app developers paper over the total lack of API convergence and the users suffer utterly inappropriate interfaces.

Of late they're trying to look more serious about actual convergence but it's too late, Win8/WP showed users the 'one UI everywhere' idea is just stupid, a plan born of MS marketing needs rather than sense. Even using the same core OS everywhere is questionable, I like my mobile devices tuned very differently to my desktop.

Win9 is coming too soon to show real progress on backing out the idiotic choices, if only because MS didn't take the problem seriously till more than a year after Win8 launched.

Re: An important question : SSD failure modes?

http://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-casualties-on-the-way-to-a-petabyte

Provided the controller doesn't die prematurely (used to be a problem) looks like you get sufficient warning from SMART to retire an SSD. I still won't be storing anything that cant be reconstructed or pulled from my system backup on one though.

Re: Changing to SSD is a one-way street!

My problem is I started by adding 32Gb RAM to Win8, which needed it - was hitting 24Gb RAM use during builds. With Win8.1 it now never reaches 16Gb and hardly hits the drives after stuffing 16Gb+ of ram with cached loads.

By the time the SSD went in there wasn't much left for it to do. If I done it in the other order it would look like the SSD made more difference. More and faster RAM remains the best investment in Windows systems, especially now it's catching up with Linux on memory management ;)

"there's no GUI way of creating one"

...until you install Link Shell Extension

http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html

Well... Mojang made $139mil *profit* in 2013. They also paid Notch's licensing shell another $130mil that year. If MS bought out the IP as well as the company they get both chunks as profit - $269mil annual profit starts to make this look more like a typical purchase, albeit with a tonne more risk than most.

Luckily I never saw the appeal of Minecraft, too much like the day job, so my interest ends there ;)

Re: Locked phones

This is much of the problem specialist mobile middlemen have: the supermarkets have taken too much of their market through lower prices, not pissing off the customers with hard sell and the certain knowledge that getting support will involve many less hours shouting at people.

With most phones now 'good enough' even the (dubious) sales advice isn't adding more value than the annoyance listening to BS merchants causes.

It seriously worrying that competition is now in the hands of supermarkets though, even if they're the only groups large enough to force carriers to the table.

Re: I have yet...

And I've yet to have any response or correction from reporting errors. Don't know why they bothered having the button if they were just going to ignore it but it is typical of Google, a company that listens to users even less than Microsoft!

Re: The fandroid doth protest too much, methinks!

That 'simple' ui is most of what puts me off ios, simple to the point I don't find it 'pleasant'. Win8 is similarly afflicted (along with some misguided android skins).

... And the quality of the camera will be the major decider on my next phone along with its gaming credentials because that's about all I've used my smartphone for!

Re: OnePlus One

"Presumably they make a profit out of that price"

No and with no mass production yet to lower costs and all current 'sales' being promotional they may be making a loss on the few devices shipped so far.

They're trying to build Apple style frothing fanbois attention while they wait for component costs to drop, hoping none notice the value for money eroding away as the phone ages. Obsolete before launch still seems the most likely outcome.

Apple could get away with this sort of manipulation because they ship on time and ship at prices that always make them a hefty profit.

Re: They call $1920.99 a "fire sale"??

The idea is amerkins are so used to getting shafted on mobile rates they know there's no escape.

Re: "Most mainstream touch-technology, like that on an Apple or Windows tablet, is single touch."

There's nothing new about multiple user touch either, games on phones/tablets have been doing it all along, either tracking fingers independently or in some cases tracking 2 users sharing a screen with independent controls.

What's new is bothering to apply that to a work UI. As so often, where gaming leads, the workplace follows.