Posts by Paul Shirley

Re: Wanted: Android install for Windows Phones

I suspect they know there's no way to even start until someone manages to unlock the bootloader and Microsoft probably got that one thing right.

Re: BT has "senior managers responsible for ‘customer experience’"?

In the far distant past I applied for a job at their Martlesham Heath research centre, duly trekked halfway across the country for a full days interviewing, then spent 30min being interviewed for the tech job, 60min getting the tour and the entire rest of the day being tested on my customer handling skills. For a job that would never see me meet a domestic customer and not involve business support at all.

BT have always valued the ability to bullshit customers over ability to do the job of building working systems.

[Another interview around the same time: I apply for a job in office automation, 1st question in the interview "are you happy to sign the official secrets act" and a rapid admission I'd actually be designing missile guidance systems. They at least had the decency to end the interview there and we just talked about beer for a while instead of really wasting my time]

Re: In the Pond.

One of the nice bits about ARM8 is virtualisation support for 32bit instances so yes, it could very easily just run a 64bit hypervisor and a 32bit Android client OS, run Bada in parallel, Tizen, recompile any of them for 64bit etc.

Re: I doubt the next CEO will turn things around

Such lack of imagination.

Imagine Stephen Elop as next CEO, in week 2 sending 'son of burning platform' email to the world and dumping Win8, the difference this time being there's no actual Win8 sales to lose... it could happen ;)

Re: How big !.

3.7Gb is bugger all, less than a 20min download. What pissed me off is how 4Gb of Win8.0 instantly bloats into a ~20Gb footprint and needs another 25Gb+ of working space just to unpack. How fscking incompetent do you have to be to need that much space for a clean install?

Re: I don't know why Google is allergic to storage expansion

They botched the storage architecture so badly that external SD tends to get used for things that should not be taken offline - like app storage. Yank the SD and "bad things" happen. Google applied their usual lazy response to problems, don't fix the problem, remove it by removing the feature.

Re: Re:80's?

I still remember the pain being online on dialup brought to my phone bill every month and the rapidly building stack of computers I already owned in 1986, I'd already given away my Oric just to clear space.

Was the Reg told 1976 and heard 1986? That would just miss the 1st wave of all in one computers like the CBM PET and Apple II (both 1977). Even then there were computers in homes in 1976 (Apple 1 for instance).

"People not wanting to take the step forward into the digital age has put us back 10 years"

This utter horseshit needs to die today. There was never any need for so restrictive an online policy to implement the ill defined and unexplained 'digital age' features, despite the whining of the fans.

Don't believe me? Microsoft just announced the return of the first group of those supposedly lost features!

There was no legitimate reason for the compulsion for anyone not using the features. There was never an excuse for needing a connection just to play any arbitrary game. And Microsoft finally got round to admitting it can all be done voluntarily with a hell of a lot less intrusive and potentially experience wrecking connection requirement.

Time to STFU

Re: Lumia already run on "low-end" hardware - and how many apps one needs?

It's a fair claim that no number of available apps you don't want to use matters. That all that matters is if the ones you do want exist. Fair but incomplete.

A strong market does matter. It increases the chance that rare niche app only you and a 100 others want exists. It gives you a decent choice of competing apps where there is duplication - despite coming with built in browser, calendar, media player and clock apps I currently use better 3rd party versions on my phone.

If nothing else if spurs the platform holder to try harder with their own built in apps. Lack of a strong app environment is a sign of a weak platform in many different ways and affects even users that claim not to use downloaded apps.

Re: If they make it cheap enough

The big problem is lots of keyboards of all sorts of form factor have been offered to the market and (apart from BlackBerry) the market consistently said 'meh'.

I think there are 2 issues:

1: Most people just see no need, once they learn how to thumbtype SMS and email on a touchscreen they see no advantage to physical keyboards on small devices. TBH after typing on an iPad I can't see much need for anything better for what I'm going to use and despite loving the hard keys on my old G1 I can type just as fast on my newer 4" device touchscreen.

2: most of them are so poor to use in practice. And you're going to need to prop up or otherwise support the screen somehow, maybe cart around a stand and have severe constraints on positioning - just holding the device in a comfortable viewing position can feel easier and have better ergonomics. If you're going to inflict a flat, feedback free keyboard you might as well just use the flat version on screen, especially as the onscreen versions get smarter. The ergonomic issues make this a hard sell.

I can see other input methods (voice is nearly there) completely supplanting these clumsy hacks.

Re: Cat 2 Cables

600Mhz, right on top of Freeview C37. Let's hope all those cheap cat2 cables are all up to spec, not cheap knockoffs with barely functional shielding.

Though I doubt anyone using a 4K rig is going to be watching low bitrate, low res crap on Freeview to notice ;)

They lost me after making no effort at all to get TI2012 to work on Win8 and an upgrade window to TI2013 that gave some users less than 4 months support. I got lucky with around 6month but it leaves a really bad taste.

Re: Who sells storage to the cloud storage providers?

People forced to negotiate steeper bulk discounts ;)

Given how buggy I find Win8 I struggle to see how 8.1 could make things worse, especially since they didn't touch anything in desktop mode where I'm daily confronted by glitchy shit. A 'let's block Start Menu workrounds' button is insignificant.

The strong suspicion has to be another last minute hack is about to be perpetrated on 8.1 to further discourage use of desktop mode, just like they yanked the actual menu code out of 8 RTM days before release. If they can delay fixes and break Classic Start Menu/Startisback etc. for even a week, that's a couple of users that might fall in love with Metro.

Except of course users installed those work rounds because they already rejected Metro, so hardly likely to work.

Re: No improvements in chip architecture for economic reasons?

There's a 2nd economic force at work, the demand for more power is all but over in significant parts of the market. Not only is it getting more expensive to ramp up performance, the value of that extra performance to buyers is falling - once your PC is fast enough 95% of the time that next 5% isn't worth paying a lot for.

It's the same effect that's driving the move to lower power tablet and mobile devices, laptops before that and the massive slow down in PC replacement. Concentrating computing resources in data centres can keep the quest for more performance alive a while but we're heading for a world without a driving force behind extremely costly measures to keep Moores law going.

If you use NDK there's no other option but compiling for each target. NDK is there for raw speed and any platform you fall back to Java for (or rely on Intel's ARM->x86 translator layer) is crippled.

As I said up the page, with no x86 competition to monkey wrench there's no obvious downside to using Intels compiler. Apart from the insanely restrictive platforms it runs on. TBH though there's also not much point using it over gcc, there's so much variance in performance across Android devices losing a few percent hardly matters.

Re: Give the guy a break.

He did do us the massive favour of easing Sinovsky out before freeing up the job. If you think it's been bad with monkey boy in charge, Ballmer is just ramming bad product down throats, Sinovsky actually believes there's nothing wrong with it.

@El Andy

Typical users don't drive any office software mass adoption, beyond using whatever crapware's preinstalled on their PC. Paying support fees for Linux software in business is much more likely though if there weren't so many obstacles along the way.

http://uxstyle.com/ for the theming engine. Puts back about half what MS ripped out going W7->W8

http://xxinightxx.deviantart.com/art/Royale-8-337121007 will restore some XP/W7 polish to the window chrome

There are fixes for some of the remaining rough edges (like rounding off title bars properly) I haven't bothered with.

And 1 tip: don't touch the Win8 theming options once you add the above. If you do, uninstall/reinstall seems to be the only reliable way to restore the hacks.

Re: 64KB claim of the Commodore 64 was a swizz

Not quite. BASIC probably did copy the 4K character ROM into RAM at the same mapped address (not going to find the manual to check). Everything else was simple bank switching, the RAM was still writable and usable for graphics even banked behind ROM.

The default memory map had 40K of contiguous user RAM, 38K available to BASIC and another 4K high block for direct access before doing anything tricky. Any graphics was on top of that, not taken from it. I had little problem using 60K of the RAM for games.

Was fairly similar on the other machines of the time, only the Electron and BBC seemed to have such crippling hard limits. I remember the painful explanations our BBC porting guy gave about squeezing games onto the Electron, requiring slicing the graphics then reassembling mirrored and rotated pieces in realtime. Further sapping performance.

Even lowly machines like the Oric were fully capable of paging large amounts of RAM into a simple, >32K memory space. Have to wonder what they were thinking at Acorn.

"I prefer to be different and not become borged"

...and that's why I'm not even considering IOS or WP and checking each Android device for strong customisation support, both stock and 3rd party replacement.

I'll be sticking to the market with a wild jungle of competition built over a core of compatibility. I choose what my device does and get a damn wide set of choices to make but still get to run all the apps.

Re: but that application fills me with rage

Yes but is it any worse than it's ever been? Was bloody awful long before Android 4.anything.

I suppose Google pulled an Youtube on Microsoft and sabotaged the app. Remember you read it here first.

Re: @AC 21st August 2013 11:48 GMT)

I'm pretty sure I could squeeze in an encryption key into the BIOS flash on my graphics card without too much trouble, already have tools able to edit it. Perhaps a key good for 400Gb of assorted data...

The licensing issue that screwed them is the problem: they have a choice of 2 licenses to provide YouTube (or 3 if you include handing the job off to the users browser), instead of picking 1 and complying with it's conditions, they've used the permissions of one and the obligations of the other.

They invented their own licence in effect. They either need to get fully compliant with a real licence on offer or stay blocked. Tweaking just parts of the non-compliant behaviour doesn't fix that. But Microsoft aren't in a mood to ignore any excuse to throw more shit at Google so this farce continues.

Re: Once computers are the desk

...the lawsuits for neck pain will start rolling in. Staring at where you hands comfortably sit on a desk is not something anyone should do all day.

When will people finally accept that touch is a solution to specific problems (like tiny devices with nowhere to put any other input), not something worth chasing for it's own sake and definitely not something to force into all use cases regardless of common sense. Allowing it everywhere for occasional, optional use makes sense, enforcing it everywhere never will.

Re: Promotions tab?

Since it appears to default to off they didn't really have an argument to negate!

...and when I tried turning it on, still no ads anyway.

"Sony's consoles have been harder to develop for"

Meanwhile, those of us that were paying attention (or not being paid to post BS) noticed XBone and PS4 are all but identical. Same CPU, same GPU, same memory architecture, same RAM count. OGL and DX11 are almost interchangeable.

The differences: to help it's slower DDR3 keep up with the PS4s DDR5, XBone wasted transistors on extra cache and lots of RAM<->cache copy hardware. Transistors PS4 spent on 25% more GPU stream processors. Meaning XBone is both fundamentally slower AND harder to program this time round!

Of course you can just as easily put the equivalent hardware in a PC now. The one difference is only OpenGL added support for unified memory architectures as a core function, so PS4 games will be easier to port to those PCs. Can you guess which one developers are likely to gravitate towards?